Microsoft is proving that you can do anything if you put your mind – and the resources of a multi-billion dollar corporation – to it.
After dropping off the face of the Earth, Microsoft’s search engine platform has bounced back to second place. Of course it’s still light years away from Google, but it’s a big sign that Microsoft’s large investment in restructuring its online presence has paid off.
As everyone knows, Microsoft used to have a monopoly on the search engine market. When Google crashed into town and shot MSN search to a black hole, Microsoft didn’t know what to do.
Finally, over the last year it has been crawling its way back up thanks to Bing, which it built completely from the ground up. With recent enhancements like the ability to watch Youtube, listen to music, and play video games directly from the search results page, Microsoft has re-captured attention.
Nielsen’s latest numbers of search engine market share put Microsoft at 13.9%. That’s ahead of Yahoo’s 13.1%, knocking it out of the #2 spot for the first time in over a year.
It is not a huge advantage, and with Google at 65% it may even sound like much ado about nothing. But the search engine market is one of the most difficult to make any ground at all. It’s extremely tough to get anyone to change their default search engine, but Bing has managed to gain comparatively strong ground over the last several months.
Incidentally, Ask.com and AOL both take in about 2% of all online searches, a number that hasn’t changed for either of them in a very long time.
