Bing Beats Google on Effectiveness; Can It Topple the Juggernaut?

By Simon Saavedra, Christian Post Correspondent Saturday, August 13, 2011

Has "Bing vs. Google" evolved to become a David versus Goliath battle, with one side having small but valid chances to overcome the other?

Although Google still reigns as search engine king in the U.S. and other countries, it has just lost a battle to an undersized foe, Bing.

According to a recent report by Experian Hitwise, both Bing and Yahoo! beat out Google in search effectiveness, a property that arguably lifted Google to stardom several years ago.

Yahoo! scored a search success rate of 81.36 percent in July, beating out Bing with 80.04 percent and Google with 67.56 percent – a significant difference.

For now, however, Google still dominates the search engine war in the U.S. with more than 66 percent of all the total searches conducted in the month of July 2011.

What is significant about this number is the fact that Google has been virtually unaffected by Bing since Microsoft entered the search engine race.

Back when Bing was introduced and made available to the market, it started off with 8 percent of the total search queries in the U.S. while Google's market share stood at 65 percent.

Today, more than two years later, Bing accounts for 13.19 percent of the total searches which might appear as if Bing has been eating into Google's share. False. Google dominates 66.05 percent of the total searches, down one percent from June 2011, when it stood at 67.12 percent.

So from where did Bing siphon out its growing base of audience? For the most part, Yahoo.

Since Bing and Yahoo! struck a deal in 2009 to have Bing power Yahoo! search, Yahoo's search customers have been on the transition to Bing.

As for who will dominate the search engine war, the next couple of months should shed some interesting light on how search engine trends are changing.

To keep yourself updated on the latest news on search engine wars and market share, subscribe to CP's tech feed by sending an email to simon.saavedra@christianpost.com with "Search Engine" as the title.