Did Bing Just Overtake Yahoo?

By Robin Wauters

Data from monitoring service StatCounter suggests that Bing, Microsoft’s new search decision engine, has overtaken Yahoo Search as the number two search service in the U.S. and worldwide in large part thanks to stealing market share from leader Google (GOOG).

The company’s analysis for Thursday finds that in the U.S. Bing overtook Yahoo (MSFT) to take second place on 16.28%, with Yahoo Search currently at 10.22%. For the sake of comparison: Google’s U.S. market share is pegged at 71.47%, and its worldwide share at a whopping 87.62% (vs. 5.62% for Bing and 5.13% for Yahoo).

Are people just test-driving Bing en masse, or does this have anything to do with the fact Bing is forced upon IE6 users? Or is it just because it’s that good and the advertising is already working? Either way, the jump Bing appears to have made since launching merely a couple of days ago is significant, and the drop you see in Google’s share even more so.

Are we witnessing the birth of the first true Google challenger or is this nothing but launch momentum bound to fade away?

(StatCounter claims to measure the search and browsing behavior of over two million users and says it tracks in excess of ten billion pageloads per month over its network of three million websites.)

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Comments

[Jons12:]

It would be interesting to see the market share broken down by browser type and see how much of the bing share is attributed to (forced) IE6 users.

Jun 05 10:36 AM

[Best Intern...:]

I think this is a lot of bing test driving, but Bing does seem to be good for videos and images. It would be interesting to see the market share percentages for "images" and "videos" as compared to general content searches. Bing might be able to hold some market share in these sub-categories.

Jun 05 05:45 PM