For a time back in the late 90s and even early 2000s, consumers would choose from any one of about a dozen popular search engines (AOL, Lycos, AltaVista, Yahoo, Live, Google, and so forth). Now the war has really come down to just two competitors — Microsoft, who currently controls both Yahoo and Bing (thus its nickname of Bingahoo); and Google, who controls nearly everything else.
However, Bing isn’t doing too badly. Bizreport gives us the details of a study from Experian/Hitwise that took a look at Bing’s share of the marketplace. Bing, who has been seeing solid growth over the last few months, hit a benchmark twenty-five percent (25.27%, actually) of searches in November.
The exact figures put the actual number of searches for Bingahoo properties as something to the tune of 5.4 million searches. This is a big indicator for Bing as far as overall growth, especially since it shows us that the company managed to stay very viable during the holiday season. The presentation of new search tools, most prominently the Bing catalog store view and a whole new set of Yahoo utilities, may have been what helped them over reach this point. Yahoo saw the larger share of growth, with a full three percent increase.
Another interesting fact provided by this study is that Bing and Yahoo searches more frequently lead to actual end-sites, with eighty-one percent going off site, compared to about sixty-five percent from Google. Of course, that may just indicate that more Google searchers are clicking to internal resources or using Google search for quick tools like the “define” or “time” search.
And while a twenty-five percent cut of the pie is no small deal, it doesn’t do much to alleviate the weight of Google’s empire. Google still maintains about a seventy percent portion of searches on a monthly basis, and November was no exception from them.
