
A couple of weeks ago, comScore came out with a report that said Microsoft’s Bing had reached an all-time high market share of 11.8% in November 2010.
According to rival Compete, however, Bing’s market share is actually much larger than that.
Based on search data from its panel of more than two million US-based internet users, the Kantar Media company says Bing-powered search engines as a whole grew 4.3 percent month-over-month in query volume, driving Bing’s total market share up by 1 percentage point.
Bing (‘MSFT’) and Yahoo’s search products (which are powered by Bing these days) had 14.4% and 14.6% market share, respectively, which means the combined market share of the search engines rose to a healthy 29% in November 2010, according to Compete’s search data.
Bing.com also saw the highest growth in the number of unique visitors, with a month-over-month increase of 7.4 percent (Yahoo’s number of UVs actually declined .3 percent). In November 2009, Bing’s market share was just over 10%, according to Compete.
Both ASK and AOL’s share remained flat from October 2010 to November 2010, which means there’s only one search engine whose market share effectively declined last November: Google‘s.
According to Compete, Google has seen its query volume decline for the second month in a row now, with a recent 1.1 percent month-over-month drop. Compete registered 66.4% market share for the search engine, down a noteworthy 7 percentage points compared to November 2009.
Excuse the blurry screenshot, but this was the best I could do (see source image).

Bing is a decision (search) engine from Microsoft officially announced on May 28, 2009. It combines technology from the Farecast and Powerset acquisitions, as well as new algorithms and a more colorful page design, to attempt to understand the context behind the search, which Microsoft claims gives users better results. Bing as a brand is also an attempt to eliminate the confusion caused by Microsoft’s “Windows Live” branding. Bing is now everything “search” related, whereas Windows Live encompasses the remnants...
Search is Google’s core product and is what got them an official transitive verb addition to the Merriam Webster for “google”. The product is known for its Internet-crawling Googlebots and its PageRank algorithm influenced heavily by linking. When users type keywords into the home page search box they are returned with relevant results that they can further refine. Google also has more specific search for blogs, images, news and video. Google will also return search results from your own...
Compete helps the world’s top brands improve their marketing based on the online behavior of millions of consumers. Advertisers, agencies and publishers use Compete’s products and services to create engaging online experiences and profitable advertising campaigns. Compete is located in Boston, MA, with offices across the U.S., U.K. and France. For more information, please visit http://www.compete.com/.
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