According to recent data, Bing has become the second most popular search engine in the world, overtaking Yahoo, which drops to #3.

Launched June 3 2009 Bing now accounts for 15.1 percent of searches, compared to 14.5 percent for Yahoo.

Google remains the strong leader in the search engine space with 65.9 percent market share.

There is little concern for Google just yet, with Bing’s growth coming almost exclusively at the expense of Yahoo and smaller players such as Ask.com and AOL.

It’s worth noting, information available tells us Bing is losing nearly $1 billion (USD) a quarter, and $5.5 billion since its launch.

In January 2012 Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang resigned from the board of directors and all other positions he held at Yahoo. This has been considered as possibly appeasing unhappy shareholders who blamed Yang for roadblocking efforts to breathe new life into the company. Yang’s departure came just two weeks after Yahoo appointed Scott Thompson its new CEO.

If we look back to 2000 Yahoo was one of the largest and most exciting .com companies. since then Yahoo has failed to innovate and inspire, and as a result has fallen significantly behind its competition. This could be seen as a huge oppoortunity lost given Yahoo has been there since day one.

Google has publicly accused Bing of cheating. Google says it ran a sting operation that proves Bing has been cheating. According to Google, Bing analyzes what people search for on Google - sites Bing selects from Google’s search results. Bing then uses that information to improve its own search listings.

In Bing’s defense, it has strongly rebutted Google’s assertions. Bing’s Harry Shum states…

“Bing does NOT do this. There is no Google specific search signal that is being used, no list of all the popular pages as selected just by Google users. Instead, it has a ’search signal’ based on searching activity observed across a range of sites.

We aggregate the information. The entire clickstream gets weighted along with different signals. For head queries, we have more signals. For tail queries, we have less. For the Google ’synthetic’ queries [done for the Google sting operation], we have nothing.”

Bing is unlikely to be a Google killer, and with the frightening quarter on quarter on losses, who knows what the future holds for it…but as we all know anything is possible in the digital space so keep a close watch.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 13th, 2012 at 12:32 pm and is filed under SEO & Online Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.