Google fights back – Is Bing’s market share already on the slide?
Since launching Bing in June, Microsoft has seen its new and very much improved search engine take small bites out of its rivals on a month by month basis. Bing has averaged around a 1 percent gain every month since launch, but the figures for September show that trend may have ended already. Is Bing’s market share increase already on the slide?
The launch of any new product brings publicity and a certain amount of desire to see what all the fuss is about. That definitely happened with Bing, which built on the good reviews and word-of-mouth to at least get everyone trying it out to see how it compared against longtime favorite Google. A brilliant blind search tool certainly persuaded me that Microsoft had a good chance of succeeding with Bing.
The middle of September saw Bing pass the 10 percent barrier, with Nielsen claiming 10.7 percent of searches were made on Bing. A great result but still a long way off the 64.6 percent Google could lay claim to. However, it showed Bing was heading in the right direction, towards the previously unbeatable Google.
Now we’re in October, the September results are in, at least from StatCounter. EWeek reports that StatCounter claims Bing’s market share dropped from 9.6 percent (from its own figures rather than Nielsen’s) in August to 8.5 percent in September. Google’s share recovered from 77.8 percent to 80 percent.
StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen said:
The trend has been downwards for Bing since mid-August. The wheels haven’t fallen off but the underlying trend must be a little worrying for Microsoft.
I doubt Microsoft will be getting worried quite yet. Not only is this just one company’s statistics, with Nielsen, Hitwise, Compete, and others all due to publish theirs in comping weeks, but it could also merely be a blip on the radar, a slight decrease for inexplicable reasons. And October could see Bing make bounce back.
I can only assume Microsoft will now double its efforts to promote Bing and increase its efficiency and user-friendliness. If the product is good and enough people know about it then the market share is bound to course upwards over the long term.
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October 4th, 2009
Bing is really great product from microsoft, but still it have to done more to overcome the google, but from personal review the image search of bing much better than google search engine