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After a month of hype, Bing’s share of the search market barely inches up

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Despite an onslaught of hype this month, Bing’s performance is ringing hollow.

The new Microsoft search engine increased its share of the search market by just four-tenths of a percentage point, according to an unreleased survey by Web ratings firm ComScore Inc., rising to 8.4% from 8.0% in May. Any expectation that the service was siphoning traffic from leader Google (65% of market share, unchanged from May), would appear to be unfounded. If anything, Bing sliced off a fraction of the traffic from second-place Yahoo, whose share dropped half a percentage point to 19.6%.

The lack of any major uptick by Bing has been cited by other Web analytics companies. In its numbers, Compete.com found that Bing helped Microsoft increase its market share by three-tenths of a percentage point, pegging it at 6.5% (still less than the 7.2% Microsoft had in June of 2008). And HitWise observed a slight drop in Microsoft’s market share in June.

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Analysts at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. sprinkled a few more raindrops over Bing’s parade, noting in a preview of Google’s second-quarter earnings that, ‘we estimate that Google lost up to 120bps [1.2%] of US search query share to Bing, but expect these losses to be temporary.’

-- David Sarno

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