An article that was written about a month back, along with the recent recurring commercials from Bing will tell you during a certain survey that Bing conducted, people chose the search results they got from the Bing search engine over the Google search results 2 to 1. This ratio is what Bing has been using as their key marketing point for weeks. But, judging by the way that this month’s search engine rankings from comScore turned out, it would appear that people who said they preferred Bing’s search results still have not switched over to using Bing for good. Google is still in the lead, but their lead has remained the same for a while now.
Here’s a quick summary of the results from this month’s report from comScore, regarding shares of total searches;
Google Sites led the U.S. explicit core search market in September with 66.7 percent market share (up 0.3 percentage points), followed by Microsoft Sites with 15.9 percent and Yahoo! Sites with 12.2 percent. Ask Network accounted for 3.5 percent of explicit core searches (up 0.3 percentage points), followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.8 percent (up 0.1 percentage points).
Sure, Google is still in the lead, but their percentage has not budged much. Bing has not moved much either, but Google has been pretty much stuck in their position for a while now, while Bing slowly but surely grows. We all know that Google will reign King, but if put in their position, you would think that they would want to increase their lead to make it more substantial and bullet-proof.
Anyway, this is what comScore found in regard to total search queries over the duration of the study;
More than 16.3 billion explicit core searches were conducted in September, with Google Sites ranking first with 10.9 billion. Microsoft Sites ranked second with 2.6 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2 billion, Ask Network with 565 million (up 3 percent) and AOL, Inc. with 287 million.
This is just another way of showing that Google holds its position in the lead, but it is still relatively stuck. The total number of search queries went down 4% over the course of the month, and so did Google’s share of these searches, meaning that they technically have not budged.
As for “Powered By” searches, Google accounted for nearly 70% of organic search results, while only about 25% were powered by Bing. It seems like Bing cannot catch a break when it comes to competing with Google.
So, Google’s lead has not budged much in quite some time; that much is true. However, Bing’s growth is very slow, so catching up to Google does not seem like a possibility any time soon. Maybe Google will never take over much more than the share it already has, but it is clearly evident that the company will always be in the lead when it comes to search. Google will always be the engine that marketers have to pay attention to, as it will always be a fan favorite of the everyday consumer.
