Bing continues to capture more searches
Yes, yes, yes. Google is still by far the dominant search engine, with nearly two-thirds of the market. But Microsoft's Bing is inching up, says ComScore.
Microsoft's Bing eked out 14.1 percent of all searches in the U.S. in April, according to the latest ComScore data, released yesterday.
That's still a far cry from market leader Google, which holds a commanding 65.4 percent of the market. But those numbers show a trend over the past year in which each month Bing grabs a slightly bigger slice of the U.S. search engine pie, while Google sheds a tiny amount or stays flat.
For the month, Microsoft's market share gain was just 0.2 of a percentage point, while Google's loss was 0.3 of a point. Yahoo, which traditionally has been losing market share, actually gained 0.2 of a percentage point last month, according to ComScore. As always, the numbers include just explicit core searches that people manually enter on a Web page.
Eyeing the hard numbers, Internet users conducted more than 16.2 billion explicit core searches in April. Of those, Google won 10.6 billion, Bing took home 2.3 billion, and Yahoo grabbed 2.6 billion.
Google's organic "powered by" searches, which include those at its own sites as well as Google-branded searches at AOL and Ask, accounted for 67.8 percent of all organic searches. Microsoft's "powered by" searches, which tap into those at Bing and Yahoo pages, took in 26.5 percent of all organic searches.
Compared with March, those numbers show a gain for Google and a decline for Microsoft. But looking at the longer-term picture over the past several months, Microsoft's "powered by" searches have continued to inch up, while Google's have gradually dipped.