Microsoft’s twin strategy of making Bing available across multiple devices, as well as the default search engine on Facebook, is starting to pay dividends with the company at last yapping at the heels of its giant rival, Google.
According to the latest analysis from online competitive intelligence tool, Experian Hitwise, Bing is beginning to gain some momentum and traction in the UK search market.
Perhaps not surprisingly, UK Internet users made a record number of visits to search engines last month – up by 400 million to 2.7 billion compared to December 2011 – on the back of record-breaking visits to UK retail sites of 2.8 million.
But Google’s market share dropped below 90% for the second month in a row to 88%, its lowest in five years, while rival search engines Bing (up to 4.99%), Yahoo! (3.58%) and Ask (2.59%) all increased market share.
Experian Marketing Services digital insight manager James Murray commented; “Clearly, Google still maintains a huge competitive edge over the other search engines in the UK market. There are seven times more searches conducted on Google Sites than on all the other search engines combined. However, this is encouraging news for Microsoft as bing once again starts to gain some momentum and traction in the UK search market.”
“Bing’s availability across multiple Microsoft devices and becoming the default search engine on sites such as Facebook has also contributed to an increase in market share as the way in which consumers use search engines continues to diversify.”
Not that Google seems to be unduly worried. This week it revealed that its full-year revenue had topped $50bn (£31.5bn) for the first time. Chief executive Larry Page decribed the results as “not a bad achievement in just a decade and a half”.
