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While we normally don’t comment on market share fluctuations that occur in places other than America, some recent changes in the UK may bear mentioning. According to the AT Internet Institute, Google’s share of the search market slipped by 1.6 percent between January and February.
That’s a significant amount. Indeed, as the slightly upsized figure below shows (sorry for any blurriness), if Ask and AOL had suffered similar losses, they’d have been wiped out, hitting zero.
Of course, that didn’t happen. Instead, both Yahoo and Bing benefited from Google’s dip. Yahoo gained a not-bad 0.6 percent, and Bing increased its share by an even-better 0.7 percent.
Google’s still in an extremely dominant position, but given that Microsoft’s about to spend $2 billion on Bing commercials in the UK, these changes are noteworthy. Microsoft might not be throwing its money away, as some people have speculated; there’s now the possibility that it could extend or accelerate this growth trend.
We’ll be sure to write again about the UK search market next month if anything out of the ordinary happens. In the meantime, it should be interesting to see how those Bing commercials are received.
i saw a demo of the new microsoft pivot-search feature on ted.com yesterday and it looks very impressive!
If Bing advertisement can upset the state of mind within the UK to suggest that searching the internet is something other than Googling it then potentially they could make enrodes into Google’s market share, however, speaking as a webmaster for around 70 sites within the UK, the statistics do not lie, $2 billion may give them 4-5% increase in search traffic, just if it from inquisitive searchers but what they really need to do is get themselves an adjective “Binging” and work on non-Google features to grab a niche of the market. In the UK, search = google.
I’m sure google will get the market share back again once people realize bing is not as good
The Bing TV campain has launched here with a really bizzare viral featuring a lost woman on Liverpool st station London asking for directions when everyone else on the station starts screeching like a howler monkey!
Look forward to seeing the market share results
I wonder if the Bing ad is on Youtube yet? Te he!
As long as Bing and Yahoo are so easy to manipulate by search engine optimisation the results they provide will never be as good as Google, so no matter how much advertising Microsoft do to elevate the Bing brand the search results will dominate users experience. All you need is a good search phrase based URL and you are 90% optimised for Bing. This leads it to being exposed to mis-use the Google bot is awesome and can’t be so easily worked around. It’s the Title tag with Yahoo that does 90% of the optimisation. It takes a lot of effort to get your website to the top of good search phrases with Google, you need the URL, the meta tags and well worked out good links to earn your position with Google serps and as long as this is the case it will continue dominate the market.