Continuing a trend recorded by multiple research firms, the Microsoft Bing search engine roughly doubled its share of the US search market between March 2010 and March 2011, according to data from Compete. Microsoft (primarily representing Bing) held an 8.7% market share in March 2010 and 17.5% share in March 2011.
Bing Doubles Queries YOY
Bing also grew its search market share a more modest three percent month-over-month, increasing its share from 17%. In terms of query volume, Bing also roughly doubled its figure year-over-year, rising from 1.22 billion to 2.73 billion. Unique visitors increased 57.5%
year-over-year, from 63 million to 96 million. Bing suffered a slight loss in unique visitors month-over-month, dropping 3% from 99 million.
Google Loses 15% Share YOY
While Google comfortably retained its dominant search market share in March with 63.8%, the search giant has lost a significant 15% from the 74.8% it held a year earlier. Compared to the previous month, Google lost a modest 2% from its 65% share.
Google experienced solid 7.1% month-over-month query volume growth, rising from 9.28 billion to 9.94 billion queries. However, this figure was down 11.4% from 10.48 billion queries a year earlier. Its total of 136 million unique visitors was down from both the prior month (-4.2%) and year (-18.8%).
Yahoo Loses Visitors, Gains Queries
Yahoo lost a significant 13.8% of its year-over-year visitor total, dropping from 90 million to 80 million, but gained 6.6% in year-over-year query volume. Yahoo’s market share changed little compared to the previous month or year.
Ask, AOL Gain Queries
While Ask and AOL significantly trail the top three search providers in all categories, both providers experienced substantial gains in year-over-year search query volume. In addition, Ask increased its unique visitor total about 18% from March 2010, while AOL lost about 6% of its unique visitors in that timeframe.
Bing Bangs in 2010
The Microsoft Bing search engine displayed dramatic growth in 2010, according to a white paper from comScore. “The 2010 US Digital Year in Review” indicates that Microsoft’s explicit core search volume (primarily represented by Bing) grew 29% during 2010, driven by an 8% increase in unique searchers and 20% increase in searches per searcher.