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Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT ) Bing lost some zing last month, according to Nielsen's latest MegaView Search data. The aggressively marketed search engine started strong out of the gate after last year's launch, but it lost market share sequentially to Google (Nasdaq: GOOG ) last month.
Microsoft isn't alone. All of the country's most popular search engines -- Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO ) , AOL (NYSE: AOL ) , and IAC's (Nasdaq: IACI ) Ask.com -- surrendered market share to Big G.
In other words, the problem may have less to do with Bing's shortcomings than with the strengths of market leader Google.
|
Company |
Dec. 09 |
Nov. 09 |
|---|---|---|
|
|
67.3% |
65.4% |
|
Yahoo! |
14.4% |
15.3% |
|
Microsoft |
9.9% |
10.7% |
|
AOL |
2.5% |
2.8% |
|
Ask.com |
1.7% |
1.8% |
Source: Nielsen.
Yahoo!'s perpetual fade is old news, and it will be interesting to see whether AOL's market share inches higher this month after the publicity behind its IPO. But whatever happens, I'm surprised to see Microsoft and Ask.com taking a step back in December.
Both engines seemed positioned perfectly to capitalize on the shopping-intensive month of December. Ask.com's seasonal deal$makeover and Microsoft's Cashback rebate program for online shoppers seemed like logical customer magnets over the holidays.
However, it's clear now that no one is going to slay Google. The company fulfilled a whopping 6.7 billion searches last month. If you're an advertiser, you can't generate paid-search leads without Google's platform.
Microsoft figured it may have had a shot by teaming up with Yahoo! last year, but it's standing on quicksand. Microsoft and Yahoo! combined for 24.8% of the country's searches last month, a significant drop from the 26% slice it commanded just a month earlier.
Consumers love underdogs on paper, but they lean on market leaders in real life. This is why Baidu (Nasdaq: BIDU ) soared yesterday, when Google threatened to bow out of China.
Bing came in with its guns blazing last spring, but Google flat-out owns search in this country.
Will Bing bounce back? Let us know in the comments box below.
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Report this Comment On January 14, 2010, at 10:55 AM, ozzfan1317 wrote:
Bing will eventually take enough market share from yahoo to be solidly number two. Yahoo is a mess and MSFT was smart enough to take advantage.
Report this Comment On January 14, 2010, at 4:03 PM, Fool wrote:
Bing won't put down yahoo. Just think back to the original xbox, when that went dry they quit on it just like they will on this. Stick to OS Microsoft.
Report this Comment On January 15, 2010, at 11:37 AM, SharpShopper wrote:
Bing shopping sucks in my opinion. It's one of those things where they tried to do too much with it, so it ends up being a waste of time. I'd much rather use Google Products or a shopping search engine like Sortprice.com (<a href="http://www.sortprice.com">www.sortprice.com</a> )
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