Although Bing has fallen back to third place behind Google and Yahoo!, it is still winning market share for Microsoft against its two main rivals in the US and worldwide.
StatCounter analysed search engine market share two weeks before and after the formal launch of Bing on May 28 (14 May to 27 May and 28th May to 10th June) and found that Google decreased from 78.68pc to 77.94pc (-0.74pc), while Yahoo! decreased from 11.46pc to 10.76pc (-0.7pc).
Microsoft’s share of the market, consisting of Bing, MSN Search and Live Search, increased from 7.4pc to 9pc (+1.6pc).
“It is too early to say what the long-term result will be, but this is a creditable performance by Bing,” commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO of StatCounter.
“It remains to be seen what happens to Bing after user curiosity and the reported US$100m advertising budget runs out.”
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. StatCounter Global Stats research data is based on four billion pageloads per month.
Worldwide, comparing the two weeks before and after the Bing launch, StatCounter reports a similar trend, with Microsoft taking market share.
Google decreased from 89.81pc to 89.69pc (-0.12pc), Yahoo! decreased from 5.34pc to 5.1pc (-0.24pc), while Microsoft increased from 3.08pc to 3.5pc (+0.42pc).
By John Kennedy
