Thursday 20 December 2012

Bing growth continues


Bing stole market share from main rival Google in January, as competition in the US search market increases.

Latest figures from comScore suggest Microsoft's search sites, including Bing, captured 13.1% of explicit core searches last month, up 1.1% from December 2010, while Yahoo was up 0.1% on 16.1%.

Despite its overall share declining 1% month-on-month, Google remains dominant with 65.6% of the explicit core search market.

On the broader total core search metric - which includes partner searches, cross-channel and contextual searches - Google was up 0.3% to 64.6%, while Yahoo was down from 18.8% to 17.9%

But Bing, which has been heavily-promoted since its 2009 launch, registered the highest total core search growth for the month, and was up 0.8% to 12.8%.

The Ask Network and AOL were the fourth- and fifth-largest search networks respectively.

In all, US web users made 18.56bn searches in January, up 2% on December.

Earlier this month, Bing announced that it is personalising search results based on data such as the user's search history and location.

This technique is already employed by Google.

In a blog post on the topic, Microsoft said: "The beauty of thinking differently about personalized searching is that it enables us to construct elegant solutions that require a minimal amount of personal information and, frankly, often exhibit better results than a more computationally complex predictive model alone."

Thanks to a deal struck by Microsoft and Yahoo which went into effect in August 2010, Bing now powers Yahoo search results in the US and Canada.

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