Bing's marketing blitz pays off as it gains search share, while Google drops

by Noelle McElhatton, marketingdirectmag.co.uk 12-Nov-09, 08:30

LONDON - Bing, the search engine launched by Microsoft in May, grew its share of the US search engine market in October while market leader Google's share fell.

According to Experian Hitwise, Bing added 7% to take its market share to 9.57%. This reverses September's fall in share for Bing, from 9.48 per cent to 8.96 per cent.

Google still dominates with 70.6% of searches in October but this represents a fall of 1% in searches.

Yahoo's share fell by the same amount, giving it 16.14% of the US search market according to Hitwise.

Since May Microsoft has embarked on a massive marketing push to help Bing gain market share as well as making constant feature upgrades.

Yesterday Bing unveiled the result of its much-mooted partnership with Wolfram Alpha: a technology platform designed to offer "computable knowledge" to applications.

It means that users can search for complicated information, and the search engine will be able to compute the answers.

Wolfram Alpha will also power a new body-mass-index calculation tool in Bing.

A new Microsoft website has been established to explain the enhancements to Bing.