Bing grows and grows, Google is unaffected

Latest analysis of search market shows Bing growing immensely, not at the expense of Google

Microsoft Bing is the fastest growing search engine, with its total searches growing 22% month-over-month in August, according to data from the Nielsen Company. Counting over 1 billion searches on Microsoft’s latest engine, Nielsen says Bing’s share of the market has increased from 9% in July to 10.7% in August.

Bing’s growth does not come at the expense of Google, however. The big drops in search hit Yahoo Search, which dropped 4.2% month-over-month, and Comcast Search, whose 21.6% decline is even more drastic.

Regardless of Bing’s upward movement, Google stands mighty as always at number one, with 7 billion searches and 64.6% search market share.

Looking at trends over the past few months, Nielsen’s results aren’t very surprising.

In mid-July, a J.P. Morgan survey of Bing usage in the previous month predicted that, despite Bing’s having registered 50 million unique visitors, the search engine would not affect Google. Bing got a lot of hype initially, fuelled in no small part by its $100 million advertising campaign.

But when it comes down to indisputable brand awareness, Google takes the cake.

A month later, comScore data revealed that, even though Bing continued to grab more share of the market, Google was largely unaffected.

Today’s new data from Nielsen reaffirms this.

Microsoft will likely continue to aggressively update and upgrade Bing in its monolithic attempt to end Google’s long-term domination of the search market.

Today at Tech Crunch 50, for example, Yusuf Mehdi, a senior vice President at Microsoft, announced that Bing will be featuring a new technology called “Visual Search,” which will allow users to switch to an alternative list of search results represented by images instead of lackluster blue links and text descriptions. (For users with Microsoft Silverlight 3 installed, Visual Search can tried out here.)

When it comes to search, though, the most important thing to users is whether your engine returns the best result easily and quickly. Any new tools Bing implements, no matter how pretty they are, will ultimately have to prove that they have this advantage over Google. And that’s quite the test to pass.