Search Results for: statcounter

What would be the best way for a research firm to get some notice in a market that has two or three dominant players that most turn to? Well, get the first numbers into the market place around how well Bing has performed for Microsoft. Reuters reports that StatCounter, a Dublin based research firm has done just that.

The company is based in Dublin and has published results that are based on 4 billion pageloads per month monitored through a network of websites. Drumroll please?

Bing, launched on June 3 but available to some users a few days earlier, took 8.23 percent of U.S. Web searches in June, up from 7.81 percent for Microsoft search just prior to its rollout and 7.21 percent in April, said Internet data firm StatCounter.

While it is really early in the Bing v. All Things Search battle there are claims that Bing has surged past Yahoo Search to claim the number 2 search spot (of course, that tiny dot on the horizon is Google which isn’t even bothered by this kind of stuff). TechCrunch and others are talking about how this is, at the very least, a promising start for the folks at Microsoft as they try to be the Google Slayer.

Data from monitoring service StatCounter suggests that Bing, Microsoft’s new search decision engine, has overtaken Yahoo Search as the number two search service in the U.S. and worldwide in large part thanks to stealing market share from leader Google.

OK so let’s list the possible reasons for this happening:

Bing is going to be a monthly issue apparently when it comes to reporting just how good, bad or indifferent their performance has been in the previous month. What does that mean? Well, it simply means that the reporting of results of what the market share is for the Microsoft search offering is going to be all over the map and one wonders what the real performance is after all is said and done.

Very early this month StatCounter got some press reported that bing had slipped considerably in September of ’09 (12 percent to be exact). This ‘report’ was met with some valid skepticism since the StatCounter folks seem to be setting themselves up as the ‘early reporters’ of search engine share. While they certainly are first to line with information it’s the whole accuracy thing that has many folks a little suspect of what is going on there. Even Hitwise reported a 5% drop in bing’s numbers in September.

I can’t decide if this is newsworthy or just our buddies over at StatCounter trying to get a little pub for themselves. Back in July they were reporting the June search engine numbers on the 2nd when every other reporting agency (Nielsen, comScore and HitWise) waited for their numbers to come in.

Now the Dublin based information provider is hitting the news with news that bing has suffered a greater than one percent drop in market share for the month of September. Even with that news a more revealing number could be the near 3 percentage points better that bing was in September of ’09 v. MSN Search and Live Search in September of ’08. eWeek reports