February proves largely uneventful in the web search market

Mar 10, 2010 10:33 GMT  ·  By

The search market has been remarkably stable in the US and worldwide for the past few months and the trends are keeping steady. Google dominates and slowly inches forward or manages to maintain its market share, while Microsoft's Bing nibbles away at Yahoo Search. Nine months after launch, according to comScore's measurements, Bing is still gaining market share, albeit in small increments and at the expense of Yahoo rather than Google, the actual target of Microsoft's offensive.

Google has crept up, growing from 65.4 percent to 65.5 percent in February in the US, hardly raising an eyebrow at the search giant in all likelihood. The number-two search engine, Yahoo, keeps losing users, with its market share deflating from 17 percent in January to 16.8 percent last month.

It's not exactly bleeding users, but, after many months of straight loss, it's pretty clear that the decline has to be hurting more than Yahoo's pride, it's affecting the bottom line as well. Most people in the business agree that one point of market share equals about $100 million in revenue. Yahoo isn't exactly rolling in it at the moment and has been very focused on cutting losses and the lost market share doesn't help.

On the other hand, Microsoft execs must be grinning, as the company's search engine is finally seeing some growth, even if it's not spectacular. Bing has gained 0.2 percentage points, the same that Yahoo lost, growing from 11.3 percent to 11.5 percent last month. It's not much, but it's the ninth straight month it has grown.

On the whole, though, nothing is changing, certainly not for the better for the underdogs. Google may not be growing that much these days, but it's certainly not going to lose significant market share any time soon and 65 percent is double its two closest competitors combined. And with Yahoo Search and Bing practically merging by the end of the year, Microsoft's small gains are at the expense of itself, not the best scenario whichever way you look at it.