Google Search Gets Even Bigger in November

Microsoft is pouring huge amounts of money into online search and it finally looked like it was paying off after it launched Bing last summer as the search engine was slowly picking up momentum though it was still far behind Google and even Yahoo. The latest numbers from Hitwise though show, once again, that there's no stopping Google, the search engine grew in market share in the US by 1 percent from October to November, not a whole lot but more than Bing has managed in several months. What's more, Microsoft's search engine actually took a small dive in market share in the previous month.

By the numbers, Google got 71.57 percent of the market, a 1 percent rise from the 70.6 percent it saw in October. Yahoo dropped 5 percent from 16.14 percent to just 15.39 percent while Bing saw a smaller drop of 2 percent from 9.57 percent to 9.34 percent. The only other 'major' search engine to see a rise in November, besides Google, is Ask.com which grew from 2.62 percent to 2.65 percent, a 1 percent rise.

Search market share varies quite a lot depending on the source of the data, but the overall trend is visible. While Bing has been seeing some growth since launch Google isn't budging, if anything, it's also growing mostly at the expense of Yahoo. For a while, it also looked like Google was being outmaneuvered by Bing which introduced a couple of interesting new features at launch and added a few more after that. About a month ago, Bing also launched a form of Twitter search after signing a partnership with the microblogging service.

It didn't take long though for Google to not only catch up but also show why it's the biggest search engine in the first place. Very recently, it launched a comprehensive real-time search component integrated into the main search engine going beyond anything Bing, or Yahoo for that matter, had done. Early next year, Google is also expected to introduce a greatly revamped design which will see it adopt the three pane layout of the search results page, which both Bing and Yahoo already sport.