Bing Overtakes Yahoo as the #2 U.S. Search Engine

I'm having a hard time understanding the significance of this news given the Bing / Yahoo.com partnership (Bing started powering Yahoo.com search in late August). Going forward Bing's success will be measured in terms of its performance vis-a-vis Google, so what's the relevance that it overtook Yahoo in market share?

That's good for BING, only 52% to go. (well, actually more like 26% to achieve parity).<p>I don't see how google can go up 1% / month <i>and</i> go up 1% / year at the same time.<p>Bing growing 30% per year and two percent per month means that they're already flattening out though.<p>In the article they note that since BING now powers Yahoo! search since August that BING actually has a marketshare that is roughly 26% instead of the 14% it has on its own domain.

These numbers seem off to me. Does anyone here actually run a site where Google is only 65% of your incoming search traffic?<p>Looking at traffic for a few of my own sites (mostly tech related, admittedly), Google is consistently in the 92-96% range.

Hat's off to Microsoft on this one - they've earned it.<p>I don't use Bing for my day to day search but I've used their travel search and it's not too bad. It's definitely no Hipmunk, but it's clean, minimal and pretty snappy.<p>They've made some effort to take a dull product, make it useful, improve its design and differentiate it from the competition. Yeah, the logo is hideous and embarrassing. Yeah, they've also spent a lot of cash on the advertising.<p>In the end, though, they've expended more effort in making their search product worth using than Yahoo has recently. So bravo.<p>Meanwhile: Boy, has Yahoo just lost its fighting spirit or what? What are they doing over there? There's never any interesting news from their corner. Stuck in the mud. They don't even own their search results or PPC product anymore. It's a shame, they've got a good and trusted brand.

Bing has a tough battle especially because most people (including me) equate the notion of a comprehensive search result for a query to what Google produces for that query. That is expected considering we have used it for so long.<p>Bing is my default search engine because I'm paranoid about Google's tracking practices. In my experience, I still see cases where I do not find (all results, enough results, related results, etc) what I want on Bing and then I try Google and find it.<p>They've done a decent job nevertheless.

They certainly built a great product, but it's easier to gain market share when you have a $300 million marketing budget.<p>Aside from heavy branding, they also built an absolutely brilliant, perfectly executed long-tail SEM campaign.<p>According to my internal data, Bing is one of the largest advertisers on both Yahoo and Google, approaching eBay and Amazon in volume.<p>SEMRush shows 50,000 paid keywords for Bing- but that's a tiny fraction of their actual ad spend.

So, does Bing finally allow restricting your search results to specific period? The lack of this crucial feature was why I wouldn't even bother using it, and it still doesn't seem to be available (I just had a quick look out of curiosity).

Another data sample (5 billion pageviews per month) that doesn't exactly confirm the Nielson data <a href="http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-US-weekly-200931-201037" rel="nofollow">http://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-US-weekly-200931-20...</a>

All that aggressive advertising looks like it has paid off. And competition is always good for any market.

Is it that big of a deal considering Bing powers Yahoo search anyway...? The two companies have a partnership.