Nielsen Says Bing’s Share Continues to Grow

Microsoft’s Bing search engine continues to enjoy month after month of incremental growth since its launch in May, reaching double-digit market share in August, something MSN had not enjoyed in years.

Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) Bing picked up 1.7 percentage points of market share in August to reach 10.7 percent of searches, according to figures released by The Nielsen CompanyMonday. In July, it accounted for nine percent of searches, giving Bing a monthly growth of 18.8 percent.

By comparison, Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) lost 1.1 percent of searches for a market share of 16 percent, with a month-over-month growth rate of -4.2 percent. Google remained dominant with 64.6 percent but with a slower growth rate of only 2.6 percent month-to-month.

So it would seem Bing is making gains in market share at the expense of Yahoo, its intended new search partner, rather than from the two companies’ mutual arch rival Google (NASDAQ: GOOG).

Of the some 10.8 billion searches conducted in the U.S. in August, Google processed seven billion of them, followed by Yahoo with 1.7 billion. Microsoft broke the one billion searches milestone in August, handling nearly 1.2 billion searches. In July, that figure was only 947 million Bing searches.

The software giant didn’t fare quite as well, however, when it came to a recent competition to see which of the three major search engines has the most bugs. Here’s a hint: Microsoft lost.

Online software testing marketplace uTest released the results of its Search Engine Bug Battle on Tuesday. The event is a week-long competition run each quarter to find and report bugs in various software, this time in Google, Bing, and Yahoo, according to uTest statements.

Of a total 606 bugs found by testers, Microsoft’s Bing had a total of 321 of them, or 53 percent of the total. By contrast, testers found only 130 in Google and even fewer, just 70, in Yahoo.

Further, a survey that uTest carried out after the battle found “nearly 90 percent of all survey respondents said that Google was their favorite search engine.” Despite that, Bing scored high in “usability and design.”

More than 1,100 testers from more than 50 nations participated, uTest said.

Also Monday, at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco, Microsoft showcased a Visual Search capability for Bing. Visual Search, which is currently in beta test, uses the company’s Silverlight streaming media technology.

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