Bing Overtakes Yahoo To Be No. 2 Search Engine?
By Anna Johnson on June 8th, 2009It’s early days, but data from StatCounter indicates that Microsoft’s new search engine Bing has, since it launched a week or so ago, overtaken Yahoo as the second most popular search engine behind Google.
StatCounter tracks the search and browsing behavior of more than 2 million users and 10 billion pageloads per month over its 3 million website network. It’s analysis for Thursday, June 4 2009 (just four days after Bing went public) shows that Bing was used by 16.28 percent of U.S. Internet users, more than the 10.22 percent using Yahoo. Google’s U.S. search engine share was 71.47 percent.
Bing also overtook Yahoo on a worldwide basis, claiming a 5.62 percent search engine market share, ahead of Yahoo with 5.13 percent, but still way behind Google with 87.62 percent.
It’s likely that the novelty of using Bing spurred a lot of people to use it at the expense of their regular search engine. Whether or not people will continue using Bing will undoubtedly depend on the quality of the results it generates.
But it’s not enough for Bing’s results to be as good as, or just a bit better than, Google’s results. They’ll have to be extraordinarily good to inspire people to break their highly entrenched habit of using Google. And, as we all know, breaking habits is often tough.
So although I’m personally impressed with Bing, love the interface, and like seeing a what seems to be a genuine challenger to Google… I’m still hesitant to use it over Google.
Source: Robin Wauters, “Did Bing Just Leapfrog Yahoo Search?” TechCrunch, June 5, 2009
