14 DAY TRIAL // It's probably a good thing that Bing is getting a redesign as Microsoft's search engine is hardly flying high. It did gain a bit of market share in April, too little for it to mean anything, and is up year-over-year as well.
That's more than you can say about Yahoo though, there's nowhere to go but down for it.
The other two search engines tracks in its "core" reports, meaning the ones with a market share above a rounding error, AOL and Ask are flat for the month and for the year.
Which leaves Google which, despite its huge market share and despite all the "controversies" surrounding it, is sitting comfortably at around the 65 percent market share mark, up month-over-month and year-over-year.
The data only covers desktop searches. Google ended April with 66.5 percent market share, up from, 66.4 percent in the month before.
The increase is too small to read anything into it, there are months when Google drops and months when it gains some market share, but overall it's been flat for many months now. It had 65.4 percent market share in April 2011.
Bing had 15.4 percent market share in April, up from 15.3 percent in March. It had 14.1 percent in April 2011, so it's been making some progress.
But all that progress, as always, has been at the expense of Yahoo, which already uses Bing as a backend and to provide search ads. Microsoft is cannibalizing its own market share, but at least it means that it won't have to pay Yahoo's cut of the revenue.
Speaking of Yahoo, it had 15.9 percent market share in April 2011, in what must seem like the golden days now, since it's down to 13.5 percent in April, from 13.7 percent in March. But Yahoo's got bigger problems than search market share right now.