Bing May Have Grown in December, Despite Previous Reports

ComScore provides the third search market report in as many days and the data, unsurprisingly, is different from all the other analytics firms, not only in absolute numbers, which was to be expected, but also in the trends it reveals. The report shows that Google dominated in December and even saw a very slight rise in market share but it also shows Bing growing, in contrast with the previous two reports.

Google was the clear market leader with a 65.7-percent slice of the searches done last month in the US. The search engine grew from 65.6 percent in November. Note that this percentage is based on "core market" share meaning its piece of the total number of searches done on the top five search engines in the country.

It is only slightly different from the absolute market share as the rest of the search engines combined have a very small volume of queries. The data also counts queries made outside of the main search pages. The previous data from Nielsen and Hitwise, though, took into account a much larger number of search engines.

The interesting part is Bing's trajectory, as this latest report shows Microsoft's new search engine growing in December, and a solid growth at that, up from 10.4 percent in November to 10.7 percent. Data from the other analytics firms showed Bing losing market share in December, the first drop since it launched in June and a possible indication that its initial momentum may have been lost.

Yahoo on the other hand just can't seem to catch a break and continues to lose market share, if only slightly, dropping from 17.5 percent in November to 17.3 percent in the last month of 2009. Yahoo has been slowly bleeding search market share for many months now and there's no indication that it's going to stop soon. As the proposed search deal with Microsoft gets dragged on, Yahoo is looking increasingly less appealing. [via eWeek]