Bing is Slowly Gaining Traction in UK
Bing, Microsoft’s upstart search engine, hasn’t quite been able to replicate its success in the U.S. in the European market. The latest data from Hitwise includes some good news for Microsoft, however. While every other search engine in the UK lost market share in the last year, Bing actually managed to increase its share of searches in March by 1.4% compared to one year ago. Now that’s now a huge change by any means – and its overall share of searches is still just 4.4% compared to Google’s 90%. As Hitwise’s Robin Goad points out, though, “this translates to a lot of extra searches occurring in Bing.”
It’s worth noting that Yahoo UK still powers its own search engine and – unlike the Yahoo mothership in the U.S. – doesn’t get its search data from Bing yet. The timetable for Bing’s integration into the UK version of Yahoo isn’t clear yet, but the total share of searches for a combined Bing/Yahoo would currently be just under 8%. Year-to-year, Bing was the only major search service in the UK that gained market share.
The biggest loser in the UK is Google, however, which lost 0.61% of the share of searches in March when compared to last year and 0.66% compared to February.
