For all its efforts, Microsoft just can't get ahead in the search market. After seeing some growth in the months after it launched, Bing dropped significantly in December to just 9.9 percent of the US search market, down from 10.7 percent in the previous month. Yahoo isn't faring any better either seeing yet another month of declining market share. Google, on the other hand, is surging ahead at the expense of its competitors, according to numbers from Nielsen.
A total of 9.95 billion searches were conducted in the US on the top 10 search engines monitored by the analytics company, slightly down from the 10 billion queries made in November. Of those, Google takes the lion's share 6.7 billion searches or 67.3 percent of the market. What's remarkable is that, despite its clear dominance, it still grew almost 2 percent in just one month, from 65.4 in November. All other top five search engines lost market share in December, obviously, all of it going to fuel Google's growth.
Bing had been slowly picking up market share since its launch in June, though its rise was far from dramatic, but it now looks like that stopped dropping a significant, at its size, 0.6 percent in just one month. These numbers come from just one analytics firm and it may be just a one-month fluke, but it doesn't look good for Microsoft which has been pouring huge amounts of money into search for very little return.
Yahoo seems resigned to losing market share and has been bleeding users for
a few months now. This wouldn't be much of a problem if those users went to Bing as the two search engines are about to merge, if they get the regulator's approval, but most of the ones leaving end up at Google. Yahoo went from 15.3 percent of the US search market in November to just 14.4 percent last month. AOL and Ask.com brought up the rear with 2.5 percent and 1.7 percent respectively, both losing market share.
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