Bing-Powered Search Grabs 30% of the US Market
According to the latest numbers from Experian Hitwise, Bing-powered search grabbed more than 30 percent of U.S. searches conducted in March. Google was the only major search engine to lose month-over-month market share.
While it was still clearly the king of the hill with 64.42 percent of U.S. searches in March, Google shed 3 percent of its 66.69 percent share in February, according to Hitwise.
Bing-powered search claimed 30.01 percent of the market in March, up 5 percent from its 28.48 percent share in February. Of this, Yahoo accounted for 15.69 percent (up 5 percent month-over-month) and Bing accounted for 14.32 percent (up 6 percent month-over-month).
This 30 percent mark is somewhat significant because it’s about where Yahoo’s search engine market share stood when Microsoft first introduced its search engine in early 2005.
The other 69 search engines Hitwise tracked accounted for 5.58 percent of U.S. searches in March.
Yahoo boasted the highest success rate in March with an 81.14 percent mark, which means this portion of searches executed resulted in a visit to a website. Bing followed with a success rate of 80.32 percent, while Google had a success rate of 65.91 percent.
“The share of unsuccessful searches highlights the opportunity for both the search engines and marketers to evaluate the search engine result pages to ensure that searchers are finding relevant information,” according to Hitwise.
Longer search queries, or those five or more words in length, were down 3 percent in March compared to February. Meanwhile, shorter queries, or those one to four words in length, were up 1 percent month-over-month.
One-word searches accounted for 24.40 percent of all U.S. queries in March, followed by two-word queries with 23.76 percent, three-word queries with 19.88 percent and four-word queries with 13.45 percent.
Bing continues to make advances in its peripheral offerings, as it recently introduced a beta version of its Bing Business Portal for local businesses. Bing’s iPad app also made waves recently, making Google’s offering look like plain vanilla.
Google, however, hasn’t exactly been standing still. It recently re-upped its long-standing deal with IAC, which will now extend into 2016.
Sources:</strong
http://www.pcworld.com/article/224873/microsoft_tests_new_bing_business_portal.html
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2383382,00.asp
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-iac-re-ups-its-search-deal-with-google/
