In its debut week, Microsoft's revamped search engine Bing helped the operating system giant grab double digits of the U.S. search market — but just barely — as the perpetual third place runner collected 11.1% of all searches.
That's a 22% improvement for the week of June 2 to 6, up from its 9.1% share the week before, according to Comscore — one of the leading internet usage monitoring firms. Some 15.5 percent of net users searched using a Microsoft site, up from 13.8 percent the week before.
It's not clear from Comscore's announcement, however, whether Bing dinged the number one and two search engines — Google and Yahoo — or whether it stole users from even smaller players like Ask.com.
Clearly some are curious, but the real question is whether this trickle of curious Bing searchers turns into a diversion of dedicated converts.
And while those are fine improvements for Microsoft, they are not outstanding given its intense PR push for Bing's June 3 debut. There's also an ongoing $100 million ad campaign touting Bing's ability to help users make better shopping, travel and health decisions.
Bing's success matters since search market share equals big ad dollars. Google, which has some 60 to 70 percent of the market, pulled in more than $5 billion in ad revenues just last quarter. By contrast, search has been a losing proposition for Microsoft, a sore spot that threatens to becoming a festering sore as more and more computer usage moves to web services, where Google reigns and operating systems don't matter.
Bing clearly improves on Live.com, and occasionally shows up Google and Yahoo with innovative information displays (see full initial Bing review here.)
"The ultimate performance of Bing depends on the extent to which it generates more trial through its extensive launch campaign and whether it retains those trial users. It appears it is off to a good start," said Mike Hurt, comScore senior vice president.
via Bing Off to a Good Start in First Week of Search Activity, According to comScore - comScore, Inc.
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