IT News Today

Conflicting data from two Web analytics firms has muddied the waters on the performance of Microsoft’s Bing search engine last month. However, both companies agree that Yahoo’s share of the U.S. search market is falling and Google’s lead over both rivals remains huge.

Web analytics firm Compete, which based its report on data from a diverse sample of more than two million U.S. Internet users, said the volume at Microsoft’s fledgling search engine continued to grow in September. “Bing saw another month of 0.3 percentage point search share growth, which has the Microsoft engine sitting pretty during an otherwise tepid month for search engines,” said Compete’s Marko Madjarac on Thursday.

Earlier this month, however, Dublin-based StatCounter reported that Bing’s U.S. search share fell from 9.64 percent in August to 8.51 percent in September — even as Yahoo’s share fell from 10.5 percent to 9.4 percent.

“The trend has been downward for Bing since mid-August,” said StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen, based on an analysis of 1.1 billion search-engine referring clicks. “The wheels haven’t fallen off, but the underlying trend must be a little worrying for Microsoft.”

A Long Way To Go

With the return of students to U.S. schools last month, online users submitted 200 million less queries than in August. Yahoo accounted for half the shortfall by serving up 100 million less queries for an eight percent decline, Madjarac said.

“In contrast, Bing’s web search served 25 million more queries than (in August), continuing the engine’s impressive growth since its launch at the beginning of June,” Madjarac said.

Bing users last month averaged about five searches per user, per day, whereas Google users averaged about 5.6 searches and Yahoo users 7.8 searches, Madjarac explained. “So the bottom line is that Bing growth is even more impressive,” he said.

Still, Bing has a long way to go…