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Snap Judgments On 'Instant' And Week One Of Bing Powered Yahoo

Microsoft Bing has inched it way past Yahoo to become the No. 2 most searched on engine in the United States, according to Nielsen Co. data released Tuesday. Yahoo, Sunnyvale, Calif., fell from 14.6% to 13.1%, taking the No. 3 spot.

 

I'm most curious to find out if Google Instant, launched last week, will alter the number of searches on engines. I already know many people who have powered off the feature. It's not clear if they didn't want to adapt to a new way to search, or if the tool became too annoying to handle.

Nonetheless, Bing began powering Yahoo's search engine in the U.S. and Canada at the end of August, as part of the 2009 deal between the two companies. So, there's about a week's worth of data related to the deal. It's difficult to quantify a week's worth of data, but Nielsen did estimate that if combining Yahoo with Bing-powered search in August, it would represent a 26% share of search. A full month of data in September will provide more insight.

 

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Nielsen's data panel monitors searches on engines. Regardless of whether Bing powers Yahoo Search, Nielsen still credits the searches that happen on the Yahoo domain to Yahoo. That won't change, according to Shiven Ramji, vice president of Online Media Solutions at Nielsen.

Ramji says analyzing the data for about a year shows Bing has been gaining traction. Beginning from nothing to grow market share typically would have little credibility, but Bing did start with something and has gained in spite of hurtles. Looking at the data beginning in August 2009, Bing has been edging upwards in share, between .2 to .4 percentage points on average each month.

 

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Simultaneously, Yahoo has seen its share of the search market slide, which led marketers to question whether the combined search market share of Bing and Yahoo could become a formidable competitor to Google. Ask.com and AOL.com remained flat, sequentially, at 2.1% and 2% share, respectively, according to Nielsen.

Google's U.S. search share came in at 65.1% in August, according to Nielsen. It will become interesting to see if Google Instant, which launched last week, will have an influence on the search volume. Bing might have beaten Google to the punch, but Microsoft failed to implement technology from one of its own engineers.

Long Zheng wrote the front-end technology for Microsoft's search engine a year ago, using existing AJAX APIs and coding that allows searchers to see updates to queries as they type. This could have provided the boost Bing needs to close the gap with Google.

Industry researchers approach market share differently. Experian Hitwise last week reported Google ranked No. 1 in the U.S. for the four weeks ending Aug. 28 with 71.6% of search queries, followed by Yahoo at 14.3% and Bing at 9.9%.

The Conductor Research team took a different view into what the change "Powered by Bing" means by analyzing Yahoo's and Bing's queries for numerous keywords pre- and post-change. The analysis released Tuesday reveals that before the alliance, 73% of the top 50 search results differed between Yahoo & Bing. And, the top 10 results differed by nearly half, 45%.

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