While StatCounter’s data on Bing’s market share for June 4 showing that Bing managed to overtake Yahoo as the number 2 search engine, was a positive sign, Compete’s own analysis of the past weeks search engine market behavior shows that Bing’s usage did not affect overall search engine market behavior.
At first glance, the numbers maybe misleading. For instance, Compete’s data show that one week after Bing was launched, Microsoft’ s searcher penetration has increased by 2.3ppts to 11.4%. Google’s number showed only 0.7% while Yahoo has dropped by 0.2%.
Interestingly the increase in Bing’s searcher penetration could not be attributed to a lost in any of Yahoo or Google’s searcher penetration data. The surge in Bing is primarily because of the massive marketing campaign which was put up by Microsoft to launch Bing.
But the search volume that Bing has been getting since its launch is not significant enough to influence the search market share index which remained unchanged.This only means that searchers have not abandoned their preferred search engines yet and they may be using Bing but only to test it out.
It’s still too early to tell whether Bing could sustain this positive search volume. By next month, when more data has come in, that is the time when we can all tell whether Microsoft succeeded in revitalizing its search engine.
