Bing beats Yahoo in less than a week

Microsoft’s new Bing search engine has overtaken Yahoo! for market share, in under one week.

According to a report from StatCounter, Bing has rapidly gained market share, mainly from Google.

StatCounter Global Stats research data, which is based on four billion pageloads per months, shows that Bing gained 5.62% of the global search market in just three days from launch on 1st June, narrowly beating Yahoo! on 5.13%. In the same period, Google’s market share declined from 90.45% to 87.62%.

Aodhan Cullen, CEO of StatCounter commented: “It remains to be seen if Bing falls away after the initial novelty and promotion but at first sight it looks like Microsoft is on to a winner. Steve Ballmer is quoted as saying that he wanted Microsoft to become the second biggest search engine within five years. Following the breakdown in talks to acquire Yahoo! at a cost of $40bn it looks as if he may have just achieved that with Bing much sooner and a lot cheaper than anticipated.”

Bing is positioned by Microsoft as a ‘decision engine’, which aims to serve up results that help users to make better decisions in key areas such as travel and purchasing.

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READERS' COMMENTS

Bing is OK
Posted by Harry Barracuda, Manama, Bahrain on Monday 8 June 2009 at 10:14 UAE time


I think people are being a little bit paranoid here. Bing is a nicer design of search engine, and they've obviously copied the basic structure off Google anyway.

The key to it's viability is the quality and size of the index.

It can't hurt to have some sensible competition to Google, Yahoo have been wallowing around with a rubbish product for years.

Bin Bing
Posted by Geeza, London on Monday 8 June 2009 at 00:11 UAE time


Same here. Microsoft can take their search engine and shove it. Their whole 'swallow up every computer firm' attitude makes me sick. The next laptop I will buy will have an operating system other than Windows/Vista. In fact I've made a conscious decision not to buy a Microsoft product.

Give small/medium enterprise a chance.

Hmmmm....?
Posted by MindSmith on Sunday 7 June 2009 at 18:42 UAE time


As someone once said ….”There are lies, bigger lies….. and then there are statistics”. One wonders about how this was all possible with little or no major marketing effort behind this (all bing & no bling?), but then again I'm not surprised bearing in mind that although I never use a MS search engine by choice, of late whenever I have miss-typed google into the browser; Bing has popped up. The reason: having recently upgraded my laptop I forgot to remove the setting in IE that made MS Livesearch (know known as Bing) my default search engine. With ‘consent by default’ tactics like that; anyone could achieve the same 'growth' just by relying on users to mis-type URLs ...

Reminder to self: change default serach engine setting in IE, and just for good measure ..... add Bing to list of blocked sites on personal firewall, corporate network, home network, and Blackberry ;-).

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