Google Search Not Affected by Bing Growth

Bing is growing but it's not quite there yet. While it's easy to point at Bing's growth and argue that Google should be threatened, or at least take notice, most of that growth comes at the expense of Yahoo not Google.

When accounting only for explicit core searches, meaning the ones users actively and knowingly make, Bing-powered search is closing in on 30 percent, but Bing.com is taking the biggest chunks from Yahoo's market share.

"Google Sites led the U.S. explicit core search market in March with 65.7 percent market share (up 0.3 percentage points), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 15.7 percent and Microsoft sites with 13.9 percent (up 0.3 percentage points). Ask Network accounted for 3.1 percent of explicit core searches, followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.6 percent," comScore provides an overview of the US search market.

After the major search engines introduced tools that don't really function like a traditional search, search and image slideshows for Yahoo and Bing, and Instant Search for Google, the explicit core search category was created to ensure that the numbers are as close to the actual audience engagement as possible.

Google dominates with a very solid lead and has actually gained market share last month, going from 65.4 percent in February to 65.7 percent. Bing went from 13.6 percent to 13.9 percent, a much more impressive growth given its scale.

But Yahoo is losing badly, it dropped from 16.1 percent to 15.7 percent in just one month. This means that the two search engines combined, both powered by Bing technology, actually dropped by 0.1 percent points.

Bing powered search is at 29.7 percent, a solid number, but not yet 30 percent as other search market reports indicated. While Bing may be gaining, it's making very little headway in catching up to Google.