In fact, we didn’t hear anything much coming out of Redmond by way of marking Bing’s one-year anniversary …and perhaps with good reason. About midway through that year, we raised the question here of whether Bing was already headed for IT’s Land of the Living Dead. Now, even more than then, Bing’s triumph is a tough case to make.
It’s all in the numbers, and Jack Marshall over at ClickZ has done a nice job compiling and summarizing the data from scorekeepers comScore, Nielsen, and Hitwise. On average, those three providers concur that Microsoft grew its share of U.S. searches by around four percentage points over the past year. However, the majority of that growth appears to have come at the expense of partner Yahoo’s search product, as opposed to that of market leader Google. Over the same period, the three sources reported an average drop in search share for Yahoo of about 2.5 percentage points; whereas Google’s share remained relatively stable, at right around 65%.
Paid search spend is quite similar: comparing Q2’09 with Q2’10 (QTD), Efficient Frontier found that Bing’s share went from 3.8 to 7.0; while Yahoo’s took an even bigger fall in percentage, from 21.3 to 17.8. Far from being wounded, meanwhile, Google saw its share just drift on up …from 74.9 to 75.3.
Of course, success can’t truly be reckoned without knowing the vendor’s goals. It could be argued that Microsoft has prevented Google from gaining still more share; it’s unlikely to be complete coincidence that Google’s steady growth in search volume started to basically flatten around the time of Bing’s launch. So it’s possible that a modest improvement in search share for Microsoft’s properties, plus capping Google’s steady growth march, were in fact Microsoft’s modest aspirations for Bing. And in a market with an established runaway leader, achieving those things maybe ain’t all that bad, after all.
