Business as usual in search market share

(Credit: Comscore)

New month, same story: the Internet search market doesn't move very much.

Comscore released the latest data on search engine market share Wednesday, and stop me if you've heard this one before: Google has a commanding lead. It gained 0.3 percent to up its share of search queries to 64.9 percent in September, as compared with August. As usual, Yahoo and Microsoft trailed in the second and third positions.

Such has been the order in the U.S. search market since at least 2004, according to an old post on John Batelle's blog. The percentages have obviously changed--Google has doubled its share since 2004 at the expense of its rivals--but the rankings have not.

Microsoft's latest attempt to change that picture with the launch of Bing hasn't set the world on fire but is making some progress, according to the latest results. Bing's share increased slightly to 9.4 percent of the market in September, as compared with the 8 percent share that the former Live Search held in May, just before the Bing launch. Those gains have come at the expense of Yahoo, down from 20.1 percent of the market in May to 18.8 percent of the market in September.

[Gold_Storm_Mac]

Bing is okay, good for multimedia , looks nice, but google is better for research

[jms_dn]

Dude, the report in the article is for Apr/May. Aug/Sep should be posted.

[Tom Krazit]

Ugh, thanks. Will swap them out.

[shahnyboy]

I'm trying to quit the google habit but its hard. It really is the best search engine in my experience.
But i'm very skeptical of google having so much information on us... i can see them looking like an evil empire.

[William Crow]

I use Bing on my iMac with Safari. I never got the google habit. AltaVista was my choice until Bing.

[Gold_Storm_Mac]

is there an option to add bing to safari's search engine?

[Pishkado]

With some versions of Safari/OS X you can switch from Google to Yahoo!, but not bing. To make bing your Safari search engine, you can do either of two things:

1. Find the string "google" inside the Safari code, using an editor such as vi, and change it to "bing" plus two characters worth of padding so the length doesn't change.

2. Install an add-on such as Inquisitor (http://www.inquisitorx.com/safari/index_en.php) or Glims (http://www.machangout.com).

Personally, I'd go with the second. Aside from letting you change the default search engine, both offer additional useful features.

[Gold_Storm_Mac]

thx
think the 2nd one is better. don't want to mess around with any code.

[gsmiller88]

It has been downhill for Yahoo and MSN ever since 2004. I remember when Yahoo actually had a chance to overtake the big G. Ah, how times have changed.