The latest report from Hitwise concerning search volume shows Google still dominates search. Surprise, surprise. In other news, water is still wet and grass is still green. Flippancy aside, Google is dominating search with such a lead, it’s akin to watching Usain Bolt race against people who have no legs.
So much for those “Bing is making inroads concerning Google’s search share,” right? Or are we still holding out hope that Bing, which powers Yahoo search as well, will be able to make up all that ground between it and Google’s dominant position? The reason I’m asking in such a manner is because every time a report comes out about Bing taking some of Google’s market share, people come out of the woodwork, proclaiming/hoping Google’s time at the top is over.
With that in mind, does Hitwise’s latest report, with its data taken from the month of September, 2011, mean that Google has effectively rebuffed the challenges from Bing and Yahoo? A look at the findings show just how dominant Google is terms of search volume:
As you can very well see, Google’s search volume is more than all of Bing’s efforts, which, in this report, includes Bing.com, Yahoo.com, and a combination of the two. Bing makes up 12.80 percent of the search volume, Yahoo is at 15.27 percent, which, when added together, gives us the 28.07 percent, representing the Bing-powered search total.
Meanwhile, Google’s search volume comes in at a dominant 66.12 percent, more than double all of Bing’s combined search engine efforts.
With that in mind, is it time to stop saying Bing is a threat to Google’s market share? While the Panda-fueled backlash against Google is understandable, ignoring the dominant search engine when conducting SEO/SEM tasks would be an exercise in foolishness. Unless, of course, you don’t like fishing where the fish are.