Bing’s search market share stood at 9.62 percent in March 2010, according to Experian Hitwise. Fast forward a year and Bing, which now powers Yahoo’s organic search results, accounted for 30 percent of all U.S. searches.
Backing up Hitwise’s Bing data are comScore stats from February, which had Bing-powered search at 29.7 percent. ComScore’s latest search market share stats should be out this week as well.
Individually, Yahoo search accounted for 15.69 percent searches (up from 14.99 percent in February), while Bing accounted for 14.32 percent of searches (up from 13.49 percent). Bing has posted roughly 6 percent growth every month this year thus far and has come a long way since debuting with a 3 percent market share in July 2009.
Experian Hitwise’s monthly look at search market share is out, and not much changed since January. Google is king, Bing is inching up, Yahoo is still around (although it’s search results are powered by Bing) — and the rest of the 69 search engines Hitwise tracks aren’t even worth mentioning by name.
After experiencing 21 percent jump from December to January, Bing increased its market share to 13.49 percent in February, up from 12.81 percent in January. Yahoo, which is powered by Bing, saw a 3 percent gain (14.99 percent, up from 14.62 percent), meaning Bing-powered search had a 28.48 percent market share in February.
Recently, The Nielsen Company reported that 143.9 million unique viewers in the U.S. had streamed online video in January 2011. A few days later, comScore Video Metrix reported that 171.2 million unique viewers in the U.S. had watched online video content that month.
As my mother would say, the difference between these two numbers is “bigger than a breadbox.”
But wait, there’s more.
According to Nielsen, YouTube was the top online video brand with 112.8 million unique viewers in January. Facebook was #2 with 32.3 million, VEVO was #3 with 32.2 million, Yahoo! was #4 with 25.5 million, MSN/Windows Live/Bing was #5 with 17.3 million, Hulu was #6 with 11.9 million, AOL Media Network was #8 with 9.2 million, and Fox Interactive was #9 with 7.6 million.
Google’s Matt Cutts is skeptical about the latest Hitwise data that showed Bing provided users with more accurate results than Google.
As we reported earlier this week, Bing had its highest search success rate in January (81.54 percent), while Google had a 65.58 percent success rate. Hitwise defines a successful search as one that results in a visit to a website from a search engine’s result page.
On Google Buzz, Cutts last night voiced his objection to how Hitwise reports data by reposting an old 2009 comment:
Although global marketers often dream of taming the Chinese dragon, the Indian elephant may get them farther, faster. Why? The Indian market is now more measurable.
Experian, the global information services company, today announced that it is launching Hitwise in India. The Internet measurement service will help domestic and international marketers operating in India to improve their online marketing, content development, affiliate strategies and search tactics.
In a press release, Navin Chandani, Managing Director of Experian Marketing Services in India, said: “India has the fourth largest Internet population in the world and one that is growing rapidly and Experian Hitwise will provide marketers with the kind of competitive intelligence to help them accurately measure and drive even greater returns from their digital marketing activities.”
Bill Tancer, General Manager, Global Research at Hitwise, posted some interesting data today about LivingSocial and the Adoption Curve.
With Google rumored to be offering $6 billion for category leader Groupon, and The Washington Post reporting that LivingSocial is expected to get $150 million investment from Amazon, Tancer says, “Of course the question we’re all asking is whether social buying is the next big play in our 2.0 world or is it tulipesque hysteria.”
So, what does the data tell him?
This just handed me: Experian Hitwise has just announced that Google accounted for 72.15 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending Oct. 2, 2010. That’s up 1 percent over the previous month.
Meanwhile, Bing powered search received 23.64 percent of searches for the month — down 2 percent from August.
Yahoo! Search received 13.54 percent — down 5 percent from the previous month — and Bing received 10.10 percent — up 2 percent from August.
AdGooroo and Experian Hitwise have just issued a report on “Successful Paid Search Tactics The Top CPG Brands Use To Grow Market Share And Build Loyalty.” The study explores how top consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands manage their paid search programs from the perspectives of keyword selection, coverage management and other important campaign management factors.
Some key findings of the study include:
- The Top Ten CPG Websites receive 25 percent of their traffic from search engines, more than any other source
- Most Top Ten CPG Websites receive more than 80 percent of their search traffic from organic search or search engine optimization (SEO), not paid search
At some point during the crush of Connected Marketing Week, Experian Hitwise announced the launch of two new premium Search Intelligence products that can improve your search marketing performance. I just found the press release in my email, so I hope you don’t mind if I finally get around to reporting the “news.”
One of the new tools is a new Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) listings report, which provides insight into the effect of natural rank position on actual search traffic received. The rank order of the top 100 organic search results from the search landing pages is listed for three major search engines in the United States based on popular search terms.
Okay, so maybe Rupert Murdoch will get the last laugh. According to the headline of today’s post by Robin Goad, the Research Director at Hitwise UK, “Times Paywall traffic loss less than expected.”
Less than expected?
I expected the market share for The Times of London would go down after its controversial move to take their content behind a paywall and charge online consumers to read their content. And according to Hitwise UK, it has.
