It’s not even three years old yet, but Microsoft’s Bing search engine now has about the same share of the market as Yahoo, which has been around since 1995. Bing hit 15% of the search engine market in November, according to ComScore. Yahoo had 15.1%.
Both sites trail far behind Google, which holds onto more than 65% of the market. While that position isn’t threatened by any other search engine, it’s interesting to note how quickly Bing has risen in the last few years.
Bing has a number of factors working in its favor. First, it’s made by Microsoft, which has a huge marketing budget and the freedom to bake Bing into many of its own products. Earlier this year, the search engine was found to be emulating Google rather closely, to put it nicely.
It also doesn’t hurt that Yahoo has been shifting its attention to things other than search and continues to struggle to figure out which endeavors would best support its business in the future.
ComScore’s numbers didn’t include mobile search traffic, but that will certainly be a trend to watch moving forward. Between Android’s massive market share and Google’s position as the default search engine on Safari for iOS, the current market leader on desktops is sure to remain dominant on mobile devices for quite some time, even if Apple does move away from Google at some point.
The mobile search game is one area where Google and Apple don’t compete directly. Microsoft has a worthwhile mobile OS in Windows Phone 7, but best of luck to them in challenging both iOS and Android.
