Well, that didn’t take long. Bing, Microsoft’s three-year-old search engine, has officially edged out ahead of Yahoo, according to the latest data from ComScore. In December, Yahoo dropped 0.6 percentage points over the previous months, giving Microsoft a slight lead, despite the fact that Bing didn’t grow that much during the same time period.
Bing now commands 15.1% of the search market, while Yahoo has dropped to 14.5%. It’s not even a full percentage point, but this is the first time Yahoo has been ousted by Microsoft for that #2 slot behind Google.
Speaking of Google, the search giant still leads the pack by a huge margin, commanding nearly 66% of the search market. It hasn’t grown that dramatically in the last few years, but Google did add half a percentage point in December.
Bing has a long way to go before being considered a serious competitor to Google, but its growth is still noteworthy. It may be hard to believe, but Bing was only launched in mid-2009. The product was essentially a rebranding of Microsoft’s existing search engine, which trailed well behind Yahoo at that point.
Not content to remain at below 10% of the search market, Microsoft launched Bing in a bid to more aggressively compete with Google, whose search engine had risen to dominate 65% of the search market by 2009. In addition to sporting a simplified user interface and improved performance, Bing was also found to be closely emulating Google’s own search results.
Almost as rapid as Bing’s growth has been Yahoo’s decline. The company has been struggling for a few years to figure out what kind of business it is in a world dominated by Google. When Microsoft launched its new search engine in 2009, Yahoo commanded 20% of the search market. It has fallen five percentage points since then while Microsoft has increased its own market share by 7%.
