Bing Reduces Its Ping

Bing Reduces Its Ping
Bing Records First Monthly Decline Since Launch

Bing's monthly market share in the US and globally has fallen for the first time since its launch, according to analysis conducted by web analytics firm StatCounter. The firm's research arm StatCounter Global Stats finds that Bing's share of the US search market in September fell by over one percentage point to 8.51% from 9.64% in August. There was little consolation for Microsoft from the performance of its new partner, Yahoo! which also declined, to 9.40% from 10.50%.

"The trend has been downwards for Bing since mid August," commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. "The wheels haven't fallen off but the underlying trend must be a little worrying for Microsoft."

Google was the beneficiary from the decline of its main rival, increasing by more than two percentage points to 80.08% in September from 77.83% the previous month.

Globally, Bing also declined slightly to 3.25% from 3.58% - a trend mirrored by Yahoo! which fell to 4.37% from 4.84%. Google breached the 90% mark to 90.54% - similar to its global market share a year previously (90.53%).

Data is based on an analysis of 4.6 billion search engine referring clicks (1.1 billion from the US) which were collected during the period September 2008 to September 2009 from the StatCounter network of over three million websites.

StatCounter, which provides free website traffic analysis, is one of the largest web analytics firms in the world monitoring in excess of ten billion pageloads per month.

US Search Market

Date	Bing	Yahoo!	Bing & Yahoo! Combined	Google
Sep 2008	5.71%*	12.57%	18.28%*	79.36%
May 2009	7.81%*	10.99%	18.80%*	78.72%
June 2009	8.23%*	11.04%	19.27%*	78.48%
July 2009	9.41%	10.95%	20.36%	77.54%
Aug 2009	9.64%	10.50%	20.14%	77.83%
Sep 2009	8.51%	9.40%	17.91%	80.08%

* Market share figure includes MSN Search and Live Search

(ht: StatCounter)