Google expands their lead as the top US search engine for the month of July, 2013, taking up 67% of all searches. This is up just .3% from June. Their biggest competitor, Microsoft’s Bing search engine, remained steady at 17.9% of the total search, and Yahoo, Ask and AOL each dropped a tenth of a percentage point. This is all according to the latest data released from comScore.
Looking at the year over year data, Google has only picked up .2% of the traffic, moving from 66.8% of all searches in July of 2012 to 67% of the traffic in July of 2013. Bing, on the other hand, has picked up 2.2% moving from 15.7% to 17.9% from July 2012 to 2013. With 19 billion searches, that 2.2% represents an increase of 418,000,000 searches, which is not at all insignificant. Given the profitability of the display ads used by Bing and Google, Microsoft is likely pleased with this growth.
Whether or not they will be able to repeat the growth over the coming months is another matter entirely. While Microsoft has been able to gain market share, it has been getting it from the smaller search engines rather than from its main competitor, Google. This has to be a concern for the Bing search team because if they ever want to be on par with Google, they need to start winning over users from the search giant.
Google has been the target of many attack ads from Microsoft, but it seems they are having little effect, despite being quite clever. The Bing it On challenge and the Scroogled campaigns both point out what Microsoft considers flaws in Google’s search engine, but the numbers are showing that most people are happy to stay with them anyway.
You can review the full comScore report HERE.
