Bing-Yahoo Lose Net U.S. Search Market Share in January

Despite spending billions of dollars trying to build, market and improve Bing’s search engine, Microsoft hasn’t been able to make significant headway in the search engine market which continues to be dominated by Google. Recently, comScore released its U.S. search engine market share numbers for January 2012, and it reveals that Google continues to grow its search market share despite all the controversies related to privacy and social search results. ^[1]

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Microsoft’s Bing’s share of the U.S. search market increased to 15.2% in January, up 0.1%, while Google’s share increased to 66.2%, up 0.3%. These gains have come at Yahoo's expense, which saw its search market share decline 0.4% to 14.1%. Since Yahoo’s search results are powered by Bing, it means that the Microsoft–Yahoo search partnership actually lost market share to Google.

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Globally, Microsoft’s search market share is much lower. It was just 4.4% in 2011 and is expected to be 4.7% in 2012. We expect Bing to increase its global market share marginally throughout the forecast period. We don't expect it to become a major revenue engine for Microsoft any time soon as Bing and other Online Services account for only around 2% of Microsoft's $32 Trefis price estimate, which stands nearly 5% above the current market price.

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Notes:

1. comScore Releases January 2012 U.S. Search Engine Rankings, comScore [↩]

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