Bing sneaks past Yahoo in search wars

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 8 Jun 2009 at 08:39

Bing has squeaked past Yahoo into second place in the global search market, though it remains to be seen whether it can hold that position when the novelty has worn off.

A report from StatCounter Global Stats, which analyses web traffic, claims that in less than a week Bing accounted for 5.62% of all worldwide searches, slightly pipping Yahoo's 5.13%.

Clearly, work needs to be done if it wants to touch Google which continued to dominate with 87.62% of the search market.

"It remains to be seen if Bing falls away after the initial novelty and promotion but at first sight it looks like Microsoft is on to a winner," says Aodhan Cullen, CEO of StatCounter.

"Steve Ballmer is quoted as saying that he wanted Microsoft to become the second biggest search engine within five years. Following the breakdown in talks to acquire Yahoo at a cost of $40 billion, it looks as if he may have just achieved that with Bing much sooner and a lot cheaper than anticipated."

Microsoft took the wrappers off Bing - the update to Live Search - last week, and since then it has ridden a wave of media coverage.

Among the new features are the related search options, which appear in the left-hand margin of search result pages and text previews of sites, allowing you to get a better feel for what's on a page before you click the search result.