Bing Overtakes Yahoo, Becomes #2 Search Engine According To Nielsen

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It looks like we have a little bit of news in the world of search — Bing has edged out Yahoo! for the number two position in terms of US market share. The updated data is coming courtesy of Nielsen and it is showing that Bing is now number two, albeit barely.

Sure, that is good news for Microsoft, and I suppose if anyone is a Bing fanboy or girl they will likely smile at the news. That said, we cannot help but point out that Google has remained in the number one position with a whopping 65 percent. Of course, they did remain flat in terms of month over month growth. Moving on past Google though. As for the numbers that are being counted, according to Neilsen, they only count “intentional” searches and not slideshows or “contextual searches.”

In short, Bing now has 13.9 percent of US search and Yahoo! has 13.1 percent of the US market for search.

A further breakdown of some of the numbers show that;

• Bing saw an increase from 10.7 percent up to 13.9 percent from August 2009 to August 2010.
• Yahoo! saw a decrease from 16 percent down to 13.1 percent from August 2009 to August 2010.

Breaking those down a little further and we see that means a relative drop of 18 percent for Yahoo! and a relative increase of 30 percent for Bing. When you consider it like that it would appear as if Bing is making some headway. And in some cases they are. According to a Bing spokesperson, the “Verizon deal has helped the volume of mobile searches on Bing more than triple over the past year.” And to further add to that, according to that same spokesperson, that is a “long-term strategic deal” for them.

Bottom line, Google is still dominant in the search market and likely will be for some time. Of course, that is not to say that Bing cannot grow any. Except at least for the short term future, any gains from Bing may come at the expense of Yahoo! as well as some of the other smaller players such as Ask.com and AOL.