If you pay attention to search engine market share like we have to as search engine marketing consultants, you’ll recently have learned that Yahoo’s no longer #2 behind Google. At the same time, we never really seemed to be that concerned about the fact that #2 would ever change because it’s literally 50 percentage points away from getting to the #1 spot anyway.
However, this month, Comscore reports that Bing is now finally #2 after years and years of the folks over at Microsoft trying to grow their search engine. Forever, Steve Ballmer and his team tried to grow their 10% market share to something more than that – 10%. Finally, after I don’t know how many years, it’s grown 50%. While that may seem quite significant, it literally has been years getting there and it took a significant deal with Facebook most likely to help them garner that share. (Note: I personally feel it’s mainly the Facebook deal that’s gotten them there). It’s definitely not because the search engine has really gotten any better at delivering decent results to people.
So, Yahoo’s now at 14.5% with the same 2 trailing behind: Ask and AOL at both 2.9% and 1.6% respectively. Google still has a commanding 65.9% which is higher than the last time I recall and feels like they’ve actually grown back closer to the 70% mark which I believe they achieved or got close to in recent years.
The irony is that Microsoft takes care of Yahoo’s Search Engine efforts now. So, I wonder who got the better part of that deal?
