Microsoft's Bing is the fastest growing search engine in the US, and its market share has broken into double figures — capturing 10.7% in August, up from 9% in July. That's a 22% improvement, month on month.
The figures will cause glee at Microsoft, which has ploughed millions of dollars into promoting its search engine, although it's unlikely that anyone at Google is going to get unduly worried — yet. In the same set of figures, released by Nielsen, Google also slightly increased its market share in August — reaching 64.6%.
The most interesting figures in the light of Bing's gains, are Yahoo's. In August, Yahoo's share of the market dropped to 16%, a 4.24% decline on the previous month. It would be hard not to conclude that Bing's ongoing success is likely to make Yahoo, not Google, much more vulnerable.
If Bing is cannibalising Yahoo's market share, it is bound to fuel speculation about the security of the deal between the two to collaborate on search advertising, in their bid to challenge Google's position as market leader. Microsoft and Yahoo are presently in informal discussions with European antitrust regulators in the hope that the European Commission will not formally review the deal.
The shifts in market share aren't yet large enough to make search engine optimisation experts revise their strategies, but they will certainly make them wonder whether Bing has Yahoo in its sights, and whether its team is of wolves in geeks' clothing.
