14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is pretty much the only company in the search business that can compete against Google at the moment, and the fast pace at which Bing grows these days shows that the software giant has all the reasons to be optimistic in the long term.
Redmond revealed in its Q2 FY2016 financial report that search advertising revenues excluding traffic acquisition costs grew 21%, citing Windows 10 as one of the catalysts for this important increase.
Bing is the default search engine in Windows 10 and Edge browser (the default browser of the operating system) while also powering digital assistant Cortana, which is available on both PCs and smartphones powered by this OS release.
“With search, the clearest indicator of our progress is US search share, where Bing now exceeds 21%. Nearly 30% of our search revenue in December came from Windows 10 devices, partly as a result of user engagement with Cortana. We are seeing increased search engagement and monetization on Windows 10 over previous versions,” Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella explained in a conference call with investors following the earnings report.
Continued growth in the next quarters
Furthermore, Nadella explained that the company expected this growth to continue in the next quarters, but what’s more important, “Bing will continue to gain share and will remain profitable.”
Translate this to figures and you get a few more percentage points for Bing, so Microsoft’s search engine could very soon get closer to the 30 percent threshold in this particular business that has until now been dominated by Google.
The latest statistics provided by US market research firm comScore show that Bing has reached a market share of 21.1 percent in December while Google continues to lead the market with 63.8 percent. But the good news is that Bing actually managed to improve its share by 0.2 percent while Google lost 0.1 percent. Yahoo is third on the list, but far behind with just 12.4 percent.