14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is pretty much the only company that still struggles to compete against Google in the search engine world, and it seems that Redmond’s efforts are paying off these days, with new statistics proving that Bing is growing stronger in the United States.
comScore figures for the month of April 2015 indicate that Bing is now powering no less than 20.2 percent of the searches in the United States, while Google accounts for 64.2 percent of the searches in the country.
The third place goes to Yahoo with 12.7 percent, followed by Ask with 1.8 percent. Yahoo’s search engine is also powered by Bing, so Microsoft’s service actually drives more searches in the United States than these figures show.
Bing up, Google down
What’s also important is that Microsoft’s Bing search engine managed to increase its share by 0.1 percentage points as compared to March 2015, while Google actually lost 0.2 percent in the same period. All the other search engines in the United States maintained their share.
But Bing is no longer just a search engine, as Microsoft has evolved it into a stand-alone platform powering the searches not only through the website but also of several other products, including Windows, Windows Phone, Cortana, and Siri.
Bing is the search provider for personal assistants Cortana and Siri, with the latter being used by Apple for iOS mobile operating system for tablets and smartphones. At the same time, Bing is being used on the desktop for bringing search results right on the Windows Start screen.
Steve Ballmer, former Microsoft CEO, said in 2013 that competing against Google was not an easy thing to do no matter how big your company was, and admitting that, although Bing had small chances to get the leading spot, the Redmond-based tech giant owed it to its customers to at least try to offer an alternative search engine.
It turns out that Bing actually grew bigger than Ballmer himself expected, and with Satya Nadella at the helm of the company, Google’s leading spot doesn’t seem to be so far away.