Recent Search Engine Market Share Reveal Google, Bing Gain

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Market research company comScore recently released their February numbers for the search engine market. While you won’t be surprised by any of the news (Google is still #1 – by a wide margin), Bing and Google both gained ground while Yahoo’s second place spot is slowly getting chipped away.

The numbers, as they stand is Google at #1 (with 65.5%), Yahoo at #2 (with 16.8%), Bing at #3 (with 11.5%), Ask.com at #4 (with 3.7%) and AOL Search at #5 (2.5%). Google and Bing both saw increases in their market share (yes, somehow Google got bigger last month) while Yahoo and Ask.com lost some marketshare. AOL Search… somehow still relevant in 2010, didn’t lose or gain marketshare.

It’s interesting to note that Microsoft’s Bing was barely known when it was their MSN Search, and after being renamed and getting a huge marketing push featuring primetime commercials in the United States – it’s solidly taken over the #3 spot and chipping away at Yahoo’s #2 spot.

The irony is that Yahoo search will now be powered by Microsoft, so one assumes it’ll essentially be the same search results as Bing. However, Yahoo will be selling the ads on both, and Yahoo sees themselves as more as a content company with a web portal than a search company these days anyway. AOL has gone that way too – being purely focused on content with its search engine powered by Google. So as it stands, Google, Bing and Ask.com are really the only true search players in this race.