Sep 8, 2011 by Matt McGee
It’s been a year since Bing began powering the natural search results on Yahoo and the combination has gained a little more than 4% market share in the U.S. since then. Google has dropped more than six percentage points in the same time period. All of that is according to the latest Experian Hitwise report, which covers US search activity in August.
Hitwise says Bing-powered search accounted for 28.99% of all searches last month, up from 28.05% the previous month.
But in the bigger picture, Bing-powered search has upped its market share by about 4% since Yahoo began using Bing’s search results. That change was completed back on August 24, 2010. A couple weeks after that, Experian Hitwise said that Bing and Yahoo had a combined 24.56% market share in the U.S. during the first week of the partnership.
Where’d the Bing-Yahoo gains come from? According to the Hitwise numbers, they came at Google’s expense. In August 2010, Hitwise reported Google’s market share at 71.59%; as the chart above shows, that’s now down to about 65%.
Small gains? For sure. And that’s exactly what Microsoft CEO said in March 2010, when he keynoted our SMX West conference: “Tomorrow’s goal is to gain a few points, a tenth here, a tenth there, and just keep working and working.”
