After many evolutions, the search engine from Microsoft not only became profitable; but recent data shows it grabbing an ever increasing chunk from its biggest rival when it comes to market share.
It’s been a long and arduous journey for the search engine aspirations from Microsoft, with the most recent evolution rebranding it as Bing. After many partnerships which included Yahoo, Facebook, and most recently Apple’s Siri; it would seem that the company has officially grabbed enough market share to start bragging about it, and so it did.
Recent tweets from the Bing Ads team has revealed some interesting facts surrounding the search engine. According to the data — which was supplied by comScore qSearch — shows that the company grabbed a significant share of 33% in the United States, making it the biggest market for Microsoft. The U. K came in third, with 23% share; and Hong Kong grabbed the fourth position with a 20% share.
Most surprising is the popularity of Bing in Taiwan, the small Asian country off the coast of China. Microsoft grabbed a 26% share, making it the second-largest market for Bing in the world according to this data. Worldwide, however, the company remained below 10%, giving it ample room to grow in the future.
In comparison, the latest data from NetMarketShare has Bing at a worldwide share of 6.97% during July 2017; which can be considered a significant difference in relation to the data Microsoft presented. The fine print in the presentation does note that it includes all Bing-powered search queries, which could affect these results by some margin in several markets.
According to Bing Ads, the total number of searches worldwide has reached 12 billion per month, with the U. S being responsible for the majority of these at five billion monthly search requests.
Microsoft has recently started testing an interface refresh, which takes inspiration from its largest competitor Google; although it remains to be seen if this will actually make its way to consumers in the future. It also made Bing the default search tool in Windows 10, integrating it with Cortana which now has a prominent position in the task bar; however, the data does not show how this impacted growth if at all. The company has also started testing new upgrades to Cortana, integrating search results within the interface negating the need to open a browser.
It has to be noted that the numbers supplied by Microsoft are from June 2017, and at the time of publishing the latest market share information from comScore was not available.
Source and image: Twitter (1) and (2) via OnMSFT
