comScore recently released the search engine market share for September 2013 and search engine choice remains relatively static when compared to August. Across the board: Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask and AOL had almost the same search percentage as they had in August .
Here are the numbers:
- Google – September: 66.9% and August : 66.9%
- Bing – September: 18% and August : 17.8%
- Yahoo – September: 11.3% and August : 11.4%
- Ask- September: 2.5% and August : 2.6%
- AOL – September: 1.3% and August : 1.3%
It appears as though the relationship with Yahoo and Bing may be coming to an end. Last month we covered a possible split to the Bing and Yahoo partnership which has an opt out in 2015. Since the start of their relationship Yahoo has seen almost no growth in search numbers and has remained around the 12% mark over the past few months. Bing and Yahoo as team has also seen very little growth since their partnership in 2010.
Yahoo has some interesting choices to make in the comings months. Should they decide to move back to their own search platform they will need to rebuild most of their search team. In 2010 Yahoo released a large portion of its search team, although the exact number was not released at the time. A prior relationship with Google was not allow in 2008 as Google and Yahoo would have controlled 90% of the search engine market at that time.We should know more about Yahoo’s intentions after the release of their quarterly earnings later this month.
Bing also has some ground to make up in the search market. If they lose their relationship with Yahoo, they stand to lose 12% of the market that they currently share with Yahoo. The online advertising space has been profitable for both Yahoo and Bing, to lose this share of the market would be a set back for Bing.
Bing also had to change their BingItOn Challenge claim to more accurately represent their results. Originally Bing had claimed people prefer Bing 2:1 over Google. However, this claim was based on independent research done for Microsoft of 1000 people not the 5 million people who took the online challenge as suggested by their ad. More recently Bing has changed its wording to “People prefer Bing over Google for the web’s top searches.” The kicker of the entire BingItOn Challenge is that Microsoft does not provide information for its online results for privacy reasons. This leads many to believe that the entire BingItOn Challenge may just be a smart way for Bing to collect your personal preferences to better build their search engine results.
The coming months will be very interesting for Google Yahoo and Bing. I am interested to see where Yahoo falls in the wake of their seemingly failed partnership with Bing.
By Matthew Wilkos