Bing Now Tied to Yahoo in Web Searches

In the ever growing online search business, Google has been the king for many years now. After replacing AltaVista and Yahoo almost a decade ago, it’s the go to place for many of us when we’re looking for information online. But ever since Microsoft shelved their MSN search and launched Bing, the little product has been gaining grounds. Now, the Microsoft engine has just tied with Yahoo, at 15% each. As it keeps growing, it’s slowly eroding the dominant player, and getting a few more eyes to turn its way, as Microsoft keeps improving their site for users to get better results all the time.

According to numbers from Hitwise, a company monitoring the search engines, every month Bing has been gaining market share, while Google has been going down, ever so slightly. At 1% or less at a time, it’s going to be quite a while before Google starts becoming a minority, but already the company is worried. The interesting thing about Bing and Yahoo is that both are actually the same thing. Bing search powers Yahoo, so both of them use the Microsoft engine, which can make the numbers seem even more impressive, at around 30% versus 65% for Google. Of course, these are all guesses made by the various analytics firms, and the true numbers might be lower for the two up comers, with some saying they are still at 13% or even 11% each. Still, Microsoft is definitively growing on Google’s territory, and that has analysts intrigued.

Bing has grown from very little to what it is today. Many users feel Bing give them better results than Google on a number of fronts. Some of the popular functions include video search, which gives previews of the videos right there on the search page, and an image search which doesn’t filter out more risque content in the same way that Google seems to. Of course, anyone using a Windows Phone, or the default Internet Explorer bar, will also be using Bing. Whatever the reason, people are getting more accustomed to it, and that’s the last thing Google want. Still, Microsoft isn’t making money with it. In fact, the company is losing tons of money on Bing, because it’s spending so much making it better, and making those partner deals. Whether they have a true plan for future monetization of their engine is unknown, although since they are Microsoft, most figure they have the money for it.

Overall, this is all a very good thing for consumers. More competition is better, and the fact that Google no longer has such a strong monopoly forces them to innovate even faster. We get more competition, more choice, and more innovation, which is something the Internet thrives on. As both companies keep growing, we’ll see which one will end up being the favorite of most users in the years to come.