Of course, Bing needs to gain on Google for it to mean anything

Dec 17, 2011 13:21 GMT  ·  By

Google continues to dominate the US search market, that's not news to anyone. There weren't any big changes in the rankings or market share of the big players in the last month either.

However, one interesting thing did transpire in November, Bing is very, very close to overtaking Yahoo and becoming the second biggest search engine in the US.

Google lost a bit of market share, 0.2 percent points in November, but that's hardly noticeable, it went from owning 65.6 percent of the searches in October to 65.4 percent in November.

Google has been hovering around the 65 percent mark for months now, it gains a bit in some months, loses in others, but overall it's holding on to the number.

"Google Sites led the U.S. explicit core search market in November with 65.4 percent market share, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 15.1 percent and Microsoft Sites with 15.0 percent (up 0.2 percentage points)," comScore summarized the search engine rankings in November 2011.

"Ask Network accounted for 2.9 percent of explicit core searches, followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.6 percent (up 0.1 percentage points)," it said.

0.1 percent points is all that separates Bing from Yahoo Search. Considering the overall trend, Bing will be bigger than Yahoo Search in December, save for some unforeseen jump in activity over at Yahoo this month.

Of course, considering that Microsoft powers both the search results and the search ads on Yahoo Search, it's a bittersweet victory.

This cannibalism has helped Bing so far and is slowly driving Yahoo into irrelevance, though it's going to take a few years, but Bing needs to be gaining on Google and that's not really happening. In the meantime, Google is comfortable with its position, it's got enough trouble with anti-trust regulators as it is.