There’s no doubt who’s winning the search engine race right now. With 65.5 percent of search share, Google is the reigning king in the U.S. – and holds even more impressive in other countries, such as the UK, where Google now handles about 92 percent of all search queries. But this may be a case of the turtle and the hare. While Google set an amazing pace, competitors Bing and Yahoo – who together form the Bing-Yahoo alliance (or “Bingahoo” for short) – have grown to a 30 percent market share.
That’s a record for Bing and Yahoo, who when they were first allied reached only 20 percent, and one year ago reached about a quarter of market share. The 30 percent share represents a slow and steady growth for the company that’s been visible since Bing first launched. Since Bing is powering the back-end for Yahoo and all sites networked with Yahoo, this can be seen as a Microsoft victory.
Further, this growth can be blamed almost entirely on Bing. While Yahoo has either maintained its figures or slid slightly in market share, Bing had continued to make gains. From May to June, Bing rose from 14.1 percent search share to 14.4 percent. Yahoo, meanwhile, holds at 15.9 percent (the same as the company’s May figures).
This 30.3 percent market share – even the 0.3 percent by which Bing grew – isn’t being pulled from Google. In the same time frame, Google has held its own in the U.S., even growing in select portions of search (such as contextual searches). This means that Bing is pulling from former users of AOL and Ask network sites rather than from the search engine giant. The real battle will happen when Bing has pulled all it can from Ask and AOLers, and is faced with the need to churn Google users.