14 DAY TRIAL // At the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer confirmed what Internet metrics companies had already revealed with their search engine usage statistics: Bing is on an ascendant trend. In mid-2009, Microsoft made a firm step into turning its search business around. And, at least as far as the eyeballs glued to its search engine are concerned, the introduction of Bing was nothing short of a 180 degrees switch for the Redmond company. Bing went from Live Search, who was bleeding users constantly, to not just putting a stop to the audience loss, but even to grabbing market share back. Since its introduction, Bing has grown by 11 million users.
And it all started at the end of May/the start of June 2009, when Microsoft killed off Live Search, and surgically removed the Live Search brand from its properties, replacing it with Bing. In addition to the new Bing brand, the software giant also delivered a new perspective over its search engine, which evolved to being a decision engine.
“2009 was also a year in which we made incredible progress in search with Bing. In just a few months we added over 11 million new users, grew our share, and introduced a consumer service that I think is really resonating with people. We did this by redefining what search should do for consumers. We're not just trying to provide people with a list of links. We work to understand user intent, and anticipate what users are really looking for. We refer to Bing as a decision engine, because we're trying to provide tools to people to make the decision they want to make, and to accomplish the tasks that are most important to them,” Ballmer noted.
According to statistics from comScore, Bing was credited with 10.3% of the search engine market at the end of November 2009, while Google accounted for 65.6% and Yahoo for 17.5%. For the same month, Nielsen indicated that bing was up to 10.7%, with Yahoo at 15.3% and Google 15.3%.