14 DAY TRIAL // Google continues to be the top search engine out there, and it’ll obviously remain the leading choice for many years, but while many believe that Microsoft doesn’t stand a chance in this particular market, Bing keeps growing every new month.
And what’s even more encouraging for Microsoft is that Google is also declining, so it’s a double win for the software giant that hopes to become a more important player in the search business.
The latest statistics provided by comScore for the US market show just that, with Microsoft’s sites growing in the search industry while Google’s declining as compared to the previous month.
Specifically, Microsoft reached a market share in the United States of 21.9 percent in July 2016, up 0.1 percent from June, while Google dropped 0.4 percent to 63.4 percent. While Bing’s growth might not seem significant at first glance, these small increases posted every month bring Microsoft close to 22 percent market share in the US search business, making it the second most important player after Google.
Yahoo and the others still far behind
Yahoo is the third company in the charts with 12.1 percent, followed by Ask far behind with 1.5 percent. AOL is also in the top five with 1.1 percent.
Without a doubt, partly responsible for Bing’s continued growth is Windows 10, the new operating system that comes with the search engine deeply baked in. Bing is the search engine powering Cortana, the new personal assistant available on the desktop, and is the default option for Edge, the new default browser in the operating system.
Microsoft still has a long way to go to become a powerful competitor to Google, but it’s pretty much the only alternative to it right now, although opinions on Bing’s performance are still mixed. Steve Ballmer, former CEO, said that Microsoft was the only company that could ever compete with Google, and this made it more of a responsibility for it, so expect the software giant to continue investments in this market.