Microsoft’s new search engine Bing has overtaken Yahoo! as the No 2 search engine in the US and worldwide, as well as wresting market share away from Google.
“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,” commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter.
“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 US$40bn, it looks as if he may have just achieved that with Bing much sooner and a lot cheaper than anticipated.”
StatCounter’s analysis for Thursday finds that in the US, Bing leapfrogged Yahoo! to take second place at 16.28pc. Yahoo! has 10.22pc. Google still commands the majority share of the US search engine market with 71.47pc.
StatCounter data globally finds that Bing, at 5.62pc, has taken a narrow lead over Yahoo! (5.13pc). Google worldwide retains 87.62pc of the market.
StatCounter, which provides free website traffic analysis, is one of the largest web analytics companies in the world, monitoring in excess of 10 billion pageloads per month.
In March, it launched StatCounter Global Stats, a free online service that captures market share battles of search engines, browsers and operating systems including mobile.
By John Kennedy
