Almost 2 months ago CarlowSEO blogged about Google Slipping in its market share. Experian at that time was reporting on the loss of market share Google was losing to sites like Bing and Yahoo. On April 11th, Experian reported that the gap is closing even more!
In their report, Experian states that Google “accounted for 64.42 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending April 2, 2011. Bing-powered search comprised 30.01 percent”. This shows that the gap that Google had on the search market is closing at an even faster pace than originally expected. Now the interesting part of this statistic is that it isn’t the direct searches performed on Bing.com rather “Bing-powered” search engines. This seems to show that more sites are leveraging the Bing API than Google’s (or at least more sites are moving in this direction).
Perhaps the most interesting statistic isn’t about the market share, it is the underlying reason. They have measured that both engines (which are really the same engine) are increasing their “success rate” in March 2011. They state ” This means that for both search engines, more than 80 percent of searches executed resulted in a visit to a Website” However Google only “achieved a success rate of 66 percent.”
With the rate that Bing and Yahoo growing, all of us SEO professionals better start moving our clients to the uprising platforms. Google will inevitably lose money due to the ad market decreasing, and people simply using other engines. Perhaps this is the beginning of the end for this king of the hill!