In August of 2010, Bing overtook Yahoo! as the number 2 largest search provider. Keep in mind, websites concentrating on Google only are only focusing on roughly 65% of the search engine market. Although Google remained the top search site, accounting for over three out of five searches (about 65.1%); when combined together with Yahoo! and Bing, these top three search engines account for more than 9 out of 10 searches or approximately 92.1%.
Bing (along with MSN and Live) share has grown from 9.0% to 13.9%; while Yahoo!’s share has fallen from 17.1% to 13.1%.
The below tables will show ranking for the top search engine companies provided by The Nielsen Company in August 2010:
Top U.S. Search Sites – August 2010 | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|
Rank | Brand | Share of Searches | MoM change % | YoY change % |
1 | Google Search | 65.1% | 1% | 1% |
2 | MSN/Windows Live/Bing Search | 13.9% | 2% | 30% |
3 | Yahoo! Search | 13.1% | -8% | -18% |
4 | Ask.com Search | 2.1% | 0% | 24% |
5 | AOL Search | 2.0% | 0% | -37 |
Lately, there has been much speculation as to whether Bing is stealing Google’s search results to enhance their search results and gain overall search engine presence. Google has reported set up approximately 100 search results to keywords that were not previously matched by either search engine. In the second step 20 Google engineers began to run test queries from their home computers running Internet Explorer with Suggested sites and the Bing toolbar enabled. The engineers were also asked to click on the first search result on Google that would come up.
Some of the results started to appear in Bing 14 days after the experiment had started. Interestingly enough, only 9 out of the 100 searches produced the same result on Bing and Google. As a result, Google assumed that Bing was copying Google Search results.
The question is: Did Bing copy Google’s search results, or did they merely use the anonymous usage data from those 20 Google engineers (which included a search term and the urls they clicked on) to improve Bing’s search results for that keyword?
There are to many open questions, including the obvious; Why have only 9% of the search results been identical and not a higher number?