What's happened to Bing's growth?

Bing Search Engine

Since becoming the fastest growing out of the top ten search engines, Microsoft's Bing has shown the first signs of struggle in its attempts to break the 'google habit' in the industry.

A new report from Experian Hitwise has revealed that Bing usage in the US was down 5 percent in September from the previous month. This also correlates with smaller scale declines that were reported by Net Applications last week.

Hitwise's figures showed that Bing's market share in the US dropped from 9.48 to 8.96 percent in September. But in the same period, Google increased its share by almost one percent, from 70.24 to 71.08 percent in the US. Yahoo is still the second most popular search engine in America, despite suffering a three percent decline in usage.

If the Yahoo/Microsoft search deal actually goes through, Microsoft could potentially end up having a 25 percent share of the market. This is a pretty remarkable start for the fledgling facility as it tries to topple Google from its place at the summit of internet search.

But before anyone can declare either defeat or victory for anybody, we must wait for a consensus view - a collaboration of data from comScore, Hitwise, Nielsen etc, and then the trends would have to be tracked over a longer period of time.

Nonetheless, below you can find September's data to mull over in the mean time.

Note: Data is based on four-week rolling periods (ending Oct. 3, 2009, and Aug. 29, 2009) from the Hitwise sample of 10 million US Internet users.

*This includes executed searches on Bing.com, Live.com and MSN Search but does not include searches on Club.Live.com.

Source: Experian Hitwise

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