Who will Bing take down, Google or Yahoo?

I don't know if the answer is obvious to everyone... in any case, it seems obvious to me. The victim of this new search engine war is going to be Yahoo, not Google.

Let me explain:

Undisputedly, the number one search engine is Google. Its market share varies depending on which country is analyzed, but ranges from 68% in the US, to 96% in countries such as Spain where it has no competitor. Globally, Google is considered to have a market share of 87.62% (see Stat Counter)

In second place, for years now, we find Yahoo, with a share that ranges between 5% and 30% depending on the country analysed.

The third player was Microsoft's Windows Live and the fourth was Ask Jeeves in the West, and Baidu if we take into account China and other Asian countries (Baidu is number one in China [see chart]). Major search engines in China]).

But since last week we have a new player: Bing.com, Microsoft's new search engine. Let's see how this has affected the rankings.

Although it is too early to tell, as many people have entered Bing just to see what it is like, the truth is that Bing is making a name for itself in the market and, after the excitement of the 4th (see attached image), it seems to be able to maintain a stable share of visitors.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Search Engine Market Share

If we look at this graph, we can see that on June 4th Bing even moved up to second place. What is interesting about this graph is that Bing took second place, but it did so not by taking market share from Yahoo, but from Google. (To perform this analysis it is best to go to the Stat Counter link that appears at the bottom of the image and change the dates of the graph to focus on day 4.)

Why then do I insist that the victim will be Yahoo and not Google? Because being the second search engine is not the same as being the third… and if everything continues as it should, Yahoo will become the third… this will have a strong impact on the number of advertisers on this portal and ultimately, it will touch Yahoo's (already very weak) waterline to death.

Control over Yahoo's advertisers is going to be the real search engine war and the one that will decide who wins. But to get the advertisers, you first have to get market share... and that's what they're doing.

What is happening (or what is going to happen) is no surprise. Microsoft spent all of 2008 trying to buy Yahoo (see Reuters for the offer) $46 billion for the purchase of Yahoo). Since it has not succeeded, it has developed again (it did the same in 2003), its own search engine. But this time it has not done so by imitating Google, but by creating something totally different and providing services that go beyond the search for content and that in certain cases, such as travel, will be a killer application for some intermediary portals. In this type of comparative searches, it is where Bing has the most to gain and where Google, for the moment, offers no competition.

It remains to be seen whether Bing will be able to regain its share from day 4 and then hold on to its second position. It also remains to be seen whether it will be able to take more market share from Google or from Yahoo. It is too early to draw conclusions… and although, as we can see in the graph, the “novelty” effect generated by Bing is already wearing off, this is a long-distance race. Steve Ballmer stated during the launch of Bing that he wanted to “make Microsoft’s search engine the second contender within five years…” so Microsoft also knows that gaining a foothold in the search engine market is not an easy task and that it will need time to achieve it.

What is clear at the moment is that Bing is here to stay, so we will have to keep an eye on this new search engine and start analyzing its results ranking algorithm to find out as soon as possible how to appear well positioned.

At GEA we are getting down to work and when we have this type of information we will publish it both on this blog and on the GEA website.

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