According to its search analysis for August, market research firm comScore found that Bing accounted for its largest share of the market ever, as the company fielded 15.9 percent of queries. While search market share figures differ in reports from different companies, Bing’s success in comScore’s data shows some of the organization’s latest innovations could be driving more site traffic.
The largest shifts from Bing in 2012 (thus far) include:
- Launch of a social sidebar to aggregate social data relevant to a query.
- Integration of Yelp data for local search.
- Altering the number of results that appear on SERPs.
For marketers, Bing has also rolled out an inbound link disavowal tool to eliminate unwanted links that could hurt SEO strategies. Moving forward, Bing could receive an even greater lift from its new app, as well as Amazon’s decision to partner with Bing in making it the default search engine on its newest Kindle tablets.
Despite this good news for Bing, Google remains the clear leader, accounting for 66.4 percent of search queries. Meanwhile, Yahoo, Bing’s partner in search, dropped to 12.8 percent of the market, comScore found. Year-over-year, Google’s share of the market has grown from 64.8 percent last August to its current 66.4 percent. However, the company did see a minor drop from July 2012 to August 2012, falling from 66.8 to 66.4
In the final few months of 2012, Bing’s growth will be interesting to watch given the inevitable increase in queries related to holiday shopping and the impact of BingItOn.com. Brafton highlighted the site recently, reporting that the tool is, more or less, a direct challenge to Google, as it allows searchers to see whether Google or Bing offers better results.
