14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has invested a fortune to make Bing successful, and it appears that the company’s efforts are now paying off, with Bing growing every single month in the United States.
comScore data for the month of April shows that Bing improved its share last month too while Google’s search services actually declined.
At this point, Google’s sites continue to lead the market with 63.8 percent market share, down from 64 percent, while Microsoft is the runner-up with 21.6 percent, up from 21.4 percent. Both Microsoft’s growth and Google’s decline are rather minor, but they do continue a trend that started in 2015 and seems to extend to 2016 as well.
Microsoft is at this point the only company competing against Google in the search business, and the software giant claims to have found the solution to convince more people to try its services.
Windows 10 adoption helps Bing grow bigger
Bing is no longer just a search engine, but a stand-alone platform that’s powering many more services in Microsoft’s lineup and even products developed by other companies (such as Apple’s Siri).
Right now, Bing is deeply baked into Windows 10 and is the service that brings digital assistant Cortana to life. Without a doubt, this is one of the main reasons for Bing’s growth because the bigger the market share of Windows 10 and Cortana, the more the search engine improves too.
Microsoft claims that Windows 10 is installed on 300 million devices around the world, and the company has a goal of bringing it on 1 billion by 2017.
While it’s still too early to estimate if the company can meet this goal or not, Windows 10 adoption definitely helps Bing grow bigger too, especially because it’s offered not only as part of Cortana but also included in the Microsoft Edge browser that replaces Internet Explorer as the default app in the OS.