June was a good month for Microsoft. The latest Hitwise data shows that Bing’s share of the search market in June increased 2 percent over the previous month. The search engine accounted for 9.85 percent of overall U.S. searches last month, which means marketers may increasingly do well with paid searches on Bing.
Bing is performing especially well in the health vertical, where it accounted for 4.22 percent of searches – closing the gap on Yahoo, which accounted for 4.85 percent of searches in this category last month. The shift demonstrates a 94 percent increase in health searches for Bing over June of 2009, while Google’s share of this vertical dropped by 8 percent (though the search giant still took the lead with 31.22 percent of searches in this category).
Bing also saw a 197 percent increase in automotive searches, a 199 percent increase in shopping searches and a 162 percent increase in travel searches over June 2009.
Microsoft’s rising role in the search market may have something to do with Bing’s recent, user-friendly updates. The search engine now boasts Bing Entertainment features that help “customers make important entertainment decisions” and offer an aesthetically pleasing search experience.
It could also be related to Bing’s recent self-endorsement tactics. On the recently released the iPhone 4, which sold more than 1.7 million units in its first three days on the market, Bing is prompting users who visit Bing.com to make it their default search engine.
Google is the default search engine on iPhones, and – even with Bing’s strong performance in June – it is still clearly U.S. consumers’ go-to search engine. The Hitwise data reveals that Google accounted for 71.65 percent of U.S. searches in June. Notably, it rose 4 percent in the travel search market – a vertical where it may soon see further gains in light of plans to acquire travel software firm ITA.
