March was an interesting month for the search market, according to new statistics from comScore. Not so interesting that Google isn’t still on top by a huge margin, of course, but interesting insofar as the search giant lost a bit of market share, even as Bing and Yahoo improved their standing.
Let’s start with Google’s story. In February, comScore puts its market share at 65.5 percent. That declined to 65.1 percent in March, which is a moderately unusual turn of events.
As for how Bing did, it’s still Microsoft’s little search-engine-that-could, achieving its tenth straight month of gains. Not huge gains, perhaps – its market share just moved from 11.5 percent to 11.7 percent between February and March – but the streak remains impressive, and even the tiniest numbers add up over time.
Then there’s Yahoo’s tale to consider. Unfortunately for Carol Bartz, the company’s standing had dropped each of the previous 13 months. However, moving from February to March, comScore recorded a 0.1 percent gain, nudging Yahoo from 16.8 percent to 16.9 percent.
So it was definitely an interesting month, as these things go. And Bing and Yahoo, at least, are no doubt hoping April turns out to be just as unusual.