Google claims biggest market share; Yahoo and Bing not making big impact

Posted by Craig Maloney | March 20, 2013 | Filed under: Internet News

Search engine top dog, Google, made headlines this year when its market share hit an all time high of 67 percent, as of November 2012, while its competitors Yahoo! and Bing are essentially stuck trading market share with one another, neither of which are yet able to make a dent in Google’s massive market share.

Bing’s taken something of a hit this year, having lost its spot as “4th most used search engine” to Russian search engine Yandex. This, despite an aggressive TV marketing campaign reminiscent of the Pepsi Challenge, and backed by studies that have proven that people prefer Bing’s search results to Google’s. Clearly, they have a long way to go before being able to take on Google. On the other hand, they’ve made a slight gain in market share, reaching an all-time high of 16.5 percent, up from 16.3 in December, and way higher than the 15.2 percent it had in January 2012.

Yahoo on the other hand, isn’t too pleased with the way the Microsoft-Yahoo deal is working out for them. First sealed in 2009, the deal put Microsoft in charge of powering Yahoo’s search service with Bing technology, while Yahoo in turn would focus on selling advertising space for the newly formed entity, using AdCenter as the new self-service ad platform, so that it could focus on maintaining its media sites, most of which are number 1 in their respective categories. The idea was that Microsoft would get the market share they needed to compete with Google, while Yahoo! gets rid of the cost of maintaining its search technology and a little revenue to improve its bottom line.

Sadly, things haven’t worked out the way people hoped, with CEO Marissa Mayer stating that the deal had, “fallen below expectations”, and that action would need to be taken to improve the monetization to acceptable levels. There’s even rumours going around that one solution to their problem is finding another partner.

It’s clear that Google still reigns supreme in the world of search, and both Yahoo and Bing have plenty to do before they can truly start to chip away at Google’s market share.