San Francisco (CA) – Bing has reportedly boosted Microsoft’s search share by 4 points, or nearly fifty percent. According to ComScore, Microsoft sites garnered 8.2 percent of all US searches in April, 2009. However, the company increased its share to 12.1 percent during the second week of Bing’s launch.
Bing’s searcher penetration also rose concurrently, from 13.7 in the last week of May to 16.7 percent on the week of 6/8/09-6/12/09.
“It appears that Microsoft Bing has continued to generate interest from the market for the second consecutive week,” explained comScore senior vice president Mike Hurt. “These early data reflect a continued positive market reaction to Bing in the initial stages of its launch.”
Indeed, Microsoft’s share of search result pages in the US – a proxy for overall search intensity – jumped to 12.1 percent during the period of June 8-12, marking an increase of 3 percentage points from the pre-introduction work week of May 25-29.
Nevertheless, Bing is unlikely to pose a serious threat to Google’s current search market dominance. The latter’s US share is pegged at approximately 60 percent, while Yahoo has captured 20 percent of the market .
As TG Daily previously reported, Microsoft’s biggest challenge will be to differentiate itself from Google with the introduction of unique features – such as the interactive video thumbnails currently offered on Bing.
