Bing gains search engine market share

Bing has seen its share of the search engine market rise by five per cent over the past year in certain geographic areas.

The latest figures from Experian Hitwise revealed that Bing-powered search accounted for 28.12 per cent of searches conducted by US audiences during the month of May. While this represents a minor decline from the previous month - when Bing accounted for 28.25 per cent of searches - it marks a notable increase from the 26.29 per cent it held in May 2011.

Meanwhile, Google saw its searches fall by five per cent, suggesting that people are gradually becoming aware of alternatives to the internet giant. This is backed up by the fact that Yahoo! also saw improvements, with its market share rising by one per cent between April and May 2012 and by three per cent over the course of the past year.

Simon Bradstock, general manager of Experian Hitwise, commented on the results: “As automated search features have rolled out across the major search engines, we can expect to see one-word searches continue to increase as they have over the past year.

“The long tail is not going away, rather just becoming more intensified within the shorter queries, and in turn marketers need to focus more on how consumers start their searches.”

Google's dominance does appear to be slowly starting to waiver so it is worth keeping an eye out on what other search engines are pushing. However, for now Google is the one to work hard to appease and doing this is likely to revolve around one thing: content. The search engine has always stated that websites with fresh and good quality content will be ranked well in its listings, so keep this in mind when you're planning out search engine optimisation campaigns for your business.