Earlier today, comScore numbers were leaked showing that both Google and Bing were rising slightly in market share at the combined expense of Yahoo! Now, Experian Marketing Services, a different digital information marketer, has released April search engine market share numbers that contradict that notion.
Experian has Google actually losing 3.4 % of the search market share over the course the past year. They put Google currently at 64.4% of the market. Bing and Yahoo!, on the other hand, have improved numbers over the comScore report, with a combined 30% market share as of April 2012. Bing is up 2% with a 14.3% market share and Yahoo! is up 1.1% with 15.7% of the search market.
It’s hard to know which report to trust in this situation. Both have year-long trends going in different directions, meaning either their data sets or their methods of parsing that data differ. Though the comScore report has not been officially released yet, the Experian data is based on a sample of 10 million U.S. internet users, and is for web searches only – meaning they are missing mobile searches, which have become a sizable chunk of Google’s searches. Also, the fact the Experian has Yahoo! with a higher individual share of searches than Bing is, intuitively, odd. Either way, it’s clear that Google has more than double Bing’s and Yahoo!’s market share combined. That means Bing is in for a long, hard battle if it hopes to take down Google with the new Bing layout it announced yesterday.
What do you think? Has Google sprung a leak or is Yahoo! sunk? Will the new Bing make a difference in the numbers this time next year? Leave a comment below and let us know.