(Slightly) More Bing For Your Buck

When Microsoft first launched its own search engine to rival Google back in 2009, many critics were skeptical; could anything challenge the dominance of the market leader, who commanded over 85% of the search market? Microsoft was rumored to have spent over $100m on the marketing campaign to launch Bing, so they clearly had high hopes.

Well, fast forward two years, and where are we? Statcounter's new figures show that, globally, Bing conducts around 4.4% of searches, and Yahoo! (which is now powered by Bing in the US, Canada, Australia, Brazil and Mexico) ran just under 4%, meaning that Bing has forced Yahoo! into second place for the first time. Meanwhile, the reigning Goliath, Google, still commands almost 90% of the global market, and around 80% of the market in the US.

So where has all this investment got Microsoft? Almost nowhere, it seems. Google has fallen below a 90% global share for the first time since August 2009, but only barely, and neither Bing nor Yahoo! show any signs of making a serious impact on it's dominance. While some of the search engine marketing tools used by Bing, such as their Around The World Competition, were fun, ultimately as a search engine it wasn't offering anything we hadn't seen before.

While a combined attempt by Bing and Yahoo to challenge Google does give some hope, as it provides a larger network than they each did alone, this still isn't looking like the well aimed missile that could knock Google off the top spot.

It's not as if their product is significantly worse than the one provided by the competition - it isn't - but the average consumer has habits that are hard to break. Quite frankly, you do have to wonder whether the search gurus at Microsoft aren't getting more than a little frustrated at the lack of progress - and whether they have anything up their sleeves to effect a serious change.