Bing Overtakes Yahoo Search in the US for the First Time

Bing has done it, it's finally overtaken Yahoo Search. It may not be much of a victory, since Bing powers both search engines, but Microsoft will take anything it gets at this point.

The software giant has been at it for many, many years and it has only now broken through the 15 percent market share mark. What's even more painful is that it did it at Yahoo's expense and not Google's, the big player in the game.

"Google Sites led the U.S. explicit core search market in December with 65.9 percent market share (up 0.5 percentage points), followed by Microsoft Sites with 15.1 percent (up 0.1 percentage points) and Yahoo! Sites with 14.5 percent. Ask Network accounted for 2.9 percent of explicit core searches, followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.6 percent," comScore explained in its monthly report.

Google has been stagnating for quite a while now, but has seen a bit of an uptick in December, adding 0.5 percentage points to its market share, one of the biggest single-month rises in recent history.

Meanwhile, Bing only added 0.1 percentage points. It would have been enough to overtake Yahoo had it stood still, but Yahoo Search saw yet another terrible month, losing 0.6 percentage points in one go.

What's worse, it lost most of it to Google and not to Bing which would have been the lesser of two evils. Yahoo can't be pleased with its dwindling market share in the US, but it has bigger problems to worry about right now.

Microsoft on the other hand would very much like to grab some market share from Google, but it's just as happy to do it from Yahoo, even if Yahoo search ads are powered by Microsoft.