Bing Is Still Drawing Crowds, Search Share Jumps To 12 Percent

Microsoft’s new search engine Bing had a strong showing in its second week, according to the latest comScore stats. You can see our analysis of Bing’s success in its first week here. Microsoft sites’ average daily penetration among U.S. searchers reached 16.7 percent during the work week of June 8-12, up 3 percentage points from the May 25-29 period (which was prior to Bing’s introduction) and up over 1 percentage point from its first week.

Microsoft’s share of search result pages in the U.S. increased to 12.1 percent during the period of June 8-12, which is also 3 percentage points above the pre-introduction work week of May 25-29, and up 1 percentage point from the week of June 2-6, 2009.

If you take a look at the number of Google search for Bing over the past 30 days on Google Trends, searches peaked but then leveled off to a steady pace. And though Bing is still growing, according to comScore’s analytics, the growth is steady from its first week to its second week.

Bing may have come just in time for Microsoft. In May, before Bing’s debut, Microsoft’s search share was down nearly 1 percentage point to 5.0% from 5.9% a year ago, according to comScore’s search data. Google’s U.S. search share, in contrast, increased nearly 2.7 percentage points year-over-year to 60.1%, while Yahoo’s share was 13.9%, down nearly 1.6 percentage points from a year ago.

Whether or not Microsoft can sustain the initial curiosity around Bing and keep its market share gains over the long term remains to be seen. But Microsoft is pouring $80-100 million in advertising for Bing and is certainly seeing considerable growth, even to the point where it may have leapfrogged Yahoo for one day.