Bing Overtakes Yahoo as the #2 U.S. Search Engine
blog.nielsen.com
blog.nielsen.com
Also, Microsoft doesn't really want people searching through Yahoo.com, in a few years time they could power their results through Google and Microsoft wouldn't be better off. They want brand recognition for Bing, so gaining market share for Bing itself is better for them.
I don't see how google can go up 1% / month and go up 1% / year at the same time.
Bing growing 30% per year and two percent per month means that they're already flattening out though.
In the article they note that since BING now powers Yahoo! search since August that BING actually has a marketshare that is roughly 26% instead of the 14% it has on its own domain.
That would work if they hadn't grown in the previous 11 months. Unless I'm reading it wrong, which is always a possibility.
Like here we're talking about the assumption that Bing wants to knock google out of search or something, rather than have a successful, competitive product. Who says that's their plan?
I find myself doing this same thing.
Looking at traffic for a few of my own sites (mostly tech related, admittedly), Google is consistently in the 92-96% range.
84% for google, 6% yahoo, 3% bing, 7% small fry, 1.8 M uniques / day on that site.
That's according to analytics ;)
How many of them are powered by Google/Yahoo?
Even Altavista is larger than duckduckgo and they're at 0.14% or so.
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/altavista.com+duckduckgo.co...
So if that holds true on the percentage then duckduckgo is at about 0.035%. Which is really not bad at all.
Small fry: search.com 2.7%, ask.com 1%, < 1%: naver.com , aol , baidu , yandex , altavista
naiver, baidu, yandex are local search engines.
It's amazing how much the search market in the US has consolidated. You would think with the declining cost of computing power someone out there would be building their own index.
It's also interesting that cuil doesn't appear in your stats at all.
Free startup idea: Build a niche search engine covering a curated list of sites(like google custom search but with value adds like ddg). Sort of like what blog search engines are doing, but in another area.
Or you'd have to go overbroad.
Cuil is dead, they've tried to re-invent themselves in april as an encyclopedia, I think they must have missed the memo about WikiPedia's continued success.
Their search results suck too...
Duckduckgo.com is larger than cuil!
If the price is right, almost any search can be monetized.
This is how 2nd tier engines like 7search make money, except they have too much low-quality international and bot traffic to give steady conversions.
ddg could easily monetize and attract lots of advertisers if they published their exact search data, keywords and counts. Wordtracker is making a mint, millions and millions of dollars simply publishing dogpile.com search data, which has a tiny (1%) share of the search market. SEMRush is scraping Google for search data and has over 70,000 customers.
Nobody else currently does this. Privacy concerns aside, if there were a search engine that had a good keyword tool designed for advertisers, it would attract ad money in droves.
Every site attracts a different demographic of visitors, so you'd expect the browser usage and search engine usage patterns to change accordingly. Younger and more technologically adept users tend to use firefox/chrome/safari more than average and tend to use google more than average, that might explain what you see with your site.
Yahoo: 5.45%
Bing: 2.60%
Google: 90.7% Yahoo: 4.8% Bing: 3.0%
Same 30 days, one year ago:
Google: 91.96% Yahoo: 5.18% Bing: 1.8%
However, on http://Encosia.com, Google is 97% and Bing/Yahoo are less than 3% combined.
It's all about the site's audience.
I don't use Bing for my day to day search but I've used their travel search and it's not too bad. It's definitely no Hipmunk, but it's clean, minimal and pretty snappy.
They've made some effort to take a dull product, make it useful, improve its design and differentiate it from the competition. Yeah, the logo is hideous and embarrassing. Yeah, they've also spent a lot of cash on the advertising.
In the end, though, they've expended more effort in making their search product worth using than Yahoo has recently. So bravo.
Meanwhile: Boy, has Yahoo just lost its fighting spirit or what? What are they doing over there? There's never any interesting news from their corner. Stuck in the mud. They don't even own their search results or PPC product anymore. It's a shame, they've got a good and trusted brand.
Also, I still use Bing for certain, ahem, less savory searches. They have Google beat for that. I think they optimize for it, whereas Google has stated that they don't key on it either way.
Either way, shaking up the search landscape is a good thing for all of us even if you never touch Bing. Google has definitely been forced back to innovate their search UX since Bing has come out (Image search, Instant, reformatting the results screen, etc.). We all win in that scenario.
Bing is my default search engine because I'm paranoid about Google's tracking practices. In my experience, I still see cases where I do not find (all results, enough results, related results, etc) what I want on Bing and then I try Google and find it.
They've done a decent job nevertheless.
Aside from heavy branding, they also built an absolutely brilliant, perfectly executed long-tail SEM campaign.
According to my internal data, Bing is one of the largest advertisers on both Yahoo and Google, approaching eBay and Amazon in volume.
SEMRush shows 50,000 paid keywords for Bing- but that's a tiny fraction of their actual ad spend.