Popular search engine giants Google and Bing duke it out on the open market. While Google continues to grow, Bing is growing faster. Bing is owned by Microsoft Corp.
Bing’s search volume was up 29% in 2010 while Google’s searches were up 13%, according to ComSore.
Bing is gaining users and users drive advertising dollars according to CNET News. In January 2011, Google took 68% of all searches, two percentage points less than in December 2010. Bing was up 21 percentage points from December 2010 to January 2011.
Google has accused Bing of copying their search results and even set up a fake website to prove it. Google first began monitoring Bing’s search results and determined they were too close to their own when users misspelled the word they were searching for. Google then created a word that no search engine would come up with a search result for and created a website that could be that phony word’s only match. After a couple of weeks, Bing search engine brought up the site in their search. Google screamed foul play, but Bing said it was no big deal.
A recent study by Experian Hitwise reported that searches on Bing led to a website 81% of the time and Google searches led to a website only 68% of the time. If Bing is just piggybacking, their success rates wouldn’t be much different, and Bing certainly wouldn’t be that much more successful. Experian Hitwise provides data on a daily basis on how Internet users interact with websites.
Most companies would be thrilled to command almost two-thirds of the customers in their market, but with the nature of search engines, loosing users is as simple as a mouse click.
Bing bought out Yahoo! in August 2010. At that time, Microsoft held just over 28% of the search engine market (Yahoo and Bing combined), while Google enjoyed almost 69%.