Bing and Google Both Growing, at Yahoo's Expense

According to the latest data from comScore, Microsoft's search engine continues to gain ground -- but so does Google. by Jared Newman

Even with the threat of Microsoft's Bing, Google continues to take a greater share of the search engine market. But Bing is growing, too; it's Yahoo that is losing ground.

According to comScore's November statistics (via eWeek), Google and Bing are essentially having a feeding frenzy on Yahoo's lost market share. Yahoo's share fell by 0.5 percent last month to 17.5 percent. Bing grabbed most of those searches, rising from 9.9 percent in October to 10.3 percent last month.

Google took the rest, bringing its total market share from 65.4 percent to 65.6 percent in November. It is, however, a slower gain than the previous month, when Google gained a half percentage point.

Oddly enough, comScore's numbers show a different trend than those from Hitwise, released a week ago. Hitwise claims that Bing actually lost market share in November, staying well below the double digits at 9.3 percent.

Google and Bing have engaged in a bit of a search arms race lately. Both search engines have integrated Twitter results, with Bing's Twitter search and Google's real time feeds of Tweets. Last week, Google introduced "Google Goggles," which lets Android phone users perform Web searches based on camera photos. Bing has a different kind of visual search that shows results as graphics. Microsoft is also building out its Map features with Bing Maps Beta, and just released an iPhone app akin to Google's Mobile app. I doubt the impact of all these new and experimental features is reflected yet in market share.

Meanwhile, Yahoo is flailing, its market share down 2.9 percent since November 2008. The company lost toolbar deals with Acer and HP, the two biggest computer manufacturers in the world, and simply isn't innovating on search anymore.

All the better for Google and Microsoft, but with Microsoft finalizing a deal to power Yahoo Web searches with Bing, I wonder how long Microsoft can tolerate Google eating up Yahoo's losses.