Bing Drops the PR Hype, and so Does Its Search Market Share



2009 October, 3rd
Liliana Dumitru-Steffens
Liliana Dumitru-Steffens
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No pain, no gain, they say – in Microsoft’s case no hype = less market share. Bing’s glory was short: raving reviews when the search engine first launched and US$80 million marketing budget seemed enough for a good start. Now that the fire died, smoke got in Microsoft’s eyes, at least according to the latest search market share numbers released by StatCounter Global Stats.

It’s probably to early to declare Bing a looser, but if Microsoft doesn’t find a creative way to gain more users for its search engine, the numbers will only go down. The Bing/ Yahoo deal will definitely boost Bing in the future – how much only time will tell.

In the meanwhile, the numbers below appear to be the result of poor PR for Bing in September: there were no notable news about the search engine in August and September, other than the announcement of its beta search and shopping tool Bing Visual Search – a tool that seems to be already dead as this link http://www.bing.com/visualsearch leads to a page announcing that That web page doesn’t exist. Let’s see if we can help you find what you are looking for.

StatCounterGlobal

The graph shows that Bing lost 1 percent of market share, and StatCounter also reports that Bing’s share of the US search market in September fell to 8.51% from 9.64% in August. In the meanwhile, Microsoft’s new search partner Yahoo! lost some percents too, declining to 9.40% from 10.50%.

Search market share in US - 2009

Globally Bing declined to 3.25% from 3.58% and Yahoo! fell to 4.37% from 4.84%.

As expected, Google is the winner in this equation, raising to 80.08% in September from 77.83% in August in US and 90.54% globally.

About the Author

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Liliana Dumitru-Steffens is public relations consultant for Pamil Visions PR. She writes for Everything PR since January 2009. Previously she worked for My-tronic GmbH and Unilever Romania. Email Liliana at lsteffens [at] pamil-visions [dot] net.

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There Are 2 Responses So Far. »

  1. Comment by hydrofloss on 16 October 2009:

    You know, it is funny when you come down to it. You can make a flashy PR run, but if their is nothing substantial there with staying power, you will lose out. People are interested in the NEW. But if the NEW can’t hold attention, the people are gone…. Lesson to the wise…

  2. Comment by Flip and Grow Rich on 22 October 2009:

    I knew it couldn’t be done. Take down the mighty Google!!! NO way…

    I’ve yet to hear a person say “What is a (fill in the blank)?” I’ll just go “Bing” it and find out!