Written by Administrator
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Monday, 08 June 2009 18:35
StatCounter reported that Bing had surpassed Yahoo in search engine-sourced hits in their statistics. But did this peak last?In their blog last Friday StatCounter announced that Bing had surpassed Yahoo on the previous day to become the second-most popular search site.
StatCounter counts around four billion page-loads per month and, based on this data, is able to generate a reasonably accurate view of the search habits of the webocracy.
At the time of the StatCounter blog, Bing had achieved second place over Yahoo in statistics for both USA (16.28% vs. 10.22%) and worldwide (5.62% vs. 5.13%).
“It remains to be seen if Bing falls away after the initial novelty and promotion but at first sight it looks like Microsoft is on to a winner," commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. "Steve Ballmer is quoted as saying that he wanted Microsoft to become the second biggest search engine within five years. Following the breakdown in talks to acquire Yahoo! at a cost of $40bn it looks as if he may have just achieved that with Bing much sooner and a lot cheaper than anticipated."
It only lasted a single day. Perhaps Cullen was prescient.
Data for Friday clearly showed that the honeymoon lasted just a single day. The weekend didn’t help.
It is of interest that Google appears to have the lowest market penetration anywhere in the world right in their home country. In the USA, over the past 12 months they average a little over 81% of all search usage; worldwide, the average is a little under 90%.
In Australia, the Google result is just over 94% and both Yahoo and Bing remain under 3%. Best of all (for Google) the percentage has hardly varied at all over the past 12 months.
So, let’s get back to Bing.
The StatCounter data clearly shows that Bing had some stellar data; but only for a single day.
On June 4th, Bing achieved more than 15% of all searches in USA, up from a yearly average of around 6%. Unfortunately by the next day it was back to the long-term average achieved by Live + MSN.
Honeymoons are such an unrealistic thing.
On the day prior and the day after, Bing achieved around 9% in USA. From there, Bing has drifted down to not much over 4%. Worldwide, Bing seems to have achieved a little under 6% at the peak and has since drifted down to pre-launch (MSN + Live) figures of around 3%.
