14 DAY TRIAL // A recently published report from StatCounter shows that Bing, the recently launched search / decision engine from Redmond-based software company Microsoft, has registered market share loss during September, both on the US market and globally. This is the first month during which Bing sees its market share fall, and StatCounter’s research arm Global Stats shows that the drop is quite significant, of more than one percentage point.
According to the research firm, the search / decision engine from Microsoft registered a market share of 8.51 percent in September for the US, compared to 9.64 percent it accounted for in August. At the same time, the report from StatCounter also unveiled the fact that Yahoo!, Microsoft's new partner, has seen its market share going down as well, reaching 9.40 percent, compared to 10.50 percent it registered a month before.
“The trend has been downwards for Bing since mid August,” commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. “The wheels haven’t fallen off but the underlying trend must be a little worrying for Microsoft.” The fall of the two search engines has been a reason to rejoice for Google, which saw its market share rise with more than two percentage points in September, reaching 80.08 percent, up from the 77.83 percent it accounted for in August.
The global market share Bing registered in September has seen a downturn as well. Thus, the Microsoft solution accounted for 3.25 percent of the search market, down from the 3.58 percent it registered a month before. Yahoo! has declined on a global scale too, reaching 4.37 percent market share from 4.84 percent in August. Google managed to gain more ground during the month, reaching 90.54 percent, about the same market share it accounted for a year before.
StatCounter also announced that the data it presented was based on the analysis of 4.6 billion search engine referring clicks, 1.1 billion of which came from the United States. At the same time the firm also said that the clicks were collected between September 2008 and September 2009 from its network. MSN Search and Live Search have been also included in the market share figures.