According to an early report from Search Engine Land via comScore, the latest data about search engine shares are coming out and, ‘lo and behold, there’s a new number two in town as Microsoft’s Bing was used more than Yahoo for the first time ever.
Covering market shares of search engine use for December 2011, Bing crept into its second-place ranking with 15.1% of all search queries, which was a small increase from November 2011 when it had 15.0% but enough to push Yahoo down in the rankings. Yahoo, which claimed 15.1% of search queries in November 2011, slipped in market shares as it only had 14.5% for December. Again, that doesn’t really look like a lot but in a competition to determine who gets to sit next to Google, every little bit goes a long way.
And speaking of Google, it continues to enjoy its status of King of the Search Engine Mountain as it had 65.9% shares of all search queries in December. This was a bit of an increase from the previous month when it had 65.4%, but the holidays will do that for a search engine.
Apparently, though, Yahoo didn’t benefit from any holiday-driven traffic. When records for online shopping were being set last month it’s not a far leap of faith to assume that more people are spending more time on the Internet and yet… they weren’t doing that Internet thing they do with Yahoo.