14 DAY TRIAL // According to the latest Nielsen numbers, Bing has overtaken Yahoo to become the number two search engine in the US. According to the metrics company, Bing grabbed 13.9 percent of the search market in August, compared to Yahoo's 13.1 percent, the first time the two search engines switched positions.
"For the first time, MSN/Windows Live/Bing Search overtook Yahoo! as the #2 search engine in the U.S. with a 13.9% share of search volume in August 2010, a 0.25% delta increase from the previous month," Nielsen said.
"Although Google saw little change in its month-over-month search volume, it still dominates the search market, accounting for 65% of all U.S. searches," it added.
"Yahoo! followed Google and MSN/Windows Live/Bing Search with a 13.1% share of U.S. searches, falling from a 14.6% share in July 2010 (a 1.2% delta decrease or an 8% relative decrease)," it continued.
The drop is quite significant for Yahoo, which has been slowly bleeding users. Despite numerous claims otherwise, search is now a secondary focus at Yahoo and the results have been showing for the past few months.
Still, a 1.4 percent points drop in just one month is fairly significant. Yahoo's market share diminished by eight percent in the last month alone, but only 18 percent in the past year.
Bing benefited from Yahoo's loss and managed to see a small uptake in users, enough to overtake Yahoo.
While it would be easy to label this as a great Microsoft victory, different analytics companies have sometimes wildly differing numbers and it's highly unlikely that Bing will be crowned the number two search engine by too many of these companies.
Still, with Yahoo Search now being entirely powered by Bing in the US and other countries following soon, it probably doesn't matter that much who takes the second spot.