Google still way ahead of Bing, Yahoo in search engine stakes
The Google Enterprise stand is pictured at the CeBIT IT fair on March 2, 2011 in Hanover, central Germany. More than 4,200 tech firms from 70 countries are expected to attend this year’s CeBIT, with many of the big names that stayed away during the global financial crisis returning to Germany.
Google slightly increased its leading market share among US Internet-search engines last month, while Microsoft's Bing search engine also gained market share, according to research firm comScore.
Among the 17.1 billion core search queries Americans conducted last month, down from 18.36 billion in March, Marketwatch reported, Google again ranked first, with 11.4 billion searchers, followed by Microsoft, with 2.6 billion, and Yahoo with 2.3 billion.
comScore's April rankings of US search share weren't dramatically different from last month, with Google and Microsoft's sites — primarily Bing — up only 0.1 percentage points each from March.
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However, TechCrunch, citing the latest data from Experian Hitwise, wrote that Bing-powered searches — that is, searches on Bing.com and search.yahoo.com — now account for 30.01 percent of all US searches.
Searches on Google.com, according to Hitwise, declined 3 percent in April 2011 compared to the previous month, and were down 5 percent year-over-year.
But Google remains far ahead of its competitors: In April, almost 64.5 percent of all US searches were powered by Google.
Meanwhile, Marketwatch — in a separate report — cited analysts as saying that the friendship between Microsoft and Facebook was getting stronger, with the shared interest of beating Google.
The ties were underscored with the recent launch of an updated version of the Bing search engine, featuring a "social sidebar" that has tighter integration with data from Facebook.
"It's an ever closer union," analyst Karsten Weide said. "Both Facebook and Microsoft realize that they can help each other to compete with Google."
Facebook is expected to go public on May 18 with an estimated valuation of up to $96 billion.
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