Bing Becomes No.2 Search Engine at 4.37% 366
suraj.sun writes "Bing overtook Yahoo for the first time worldwide in January, and increased its lead in February, according to web analytics company, StatCounter. Its research arm StatCounter Global Stats finds that globally Bing reached 4.37%, in February ahead of Yahoo! at 3.93%. Both trail far behind Google's 89.94% of the global search engine market." Just a little more plagiarizing to go!
Excellent! (Score:5, Interesting)
Now if only it didn't suck.
I wish someone - even Microsoft - would come up with a decent alternative to Google. Being a monopoly is making them more and more corrupt, and by being the gatekeeper, they now own too much of the internet.
Re:How many by choice? (Score:5, Interesting)
Where I live, all the goverment employees computers are set to use Bing in the IE search box (and this cannot be changed, it is enforced by group policy) because Microsoft gave the government a discount if they made all government employees use Bing on their work machines.
Of course government employees can type in "google.com" into the address bar and use Google (or whoever else) if they wish, but I would imagine most just enter things into the search bar.
Baidu (Score:4, Interesting)
The fact that this article does not mention Baidu makes me very suspicious. Its information is fallacious.
Re:Yahoo = Bing (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, so now we know the number of people too lazy to change their default search engine :)
Re:Excellent! (Score:4, Interesting)
1: You don't have to be anti-competitive to be a monopoly. You just have to be significantly larger than your nearest rival.
2: Drastically undercutting your opponents prices in a new market by leveraging profits from a different market to support it can be seen as anti-competitive. Many for profit vendors see google pushing open source products as this.
Where are they getting their numbers? (Score:4, Interesting)
ComScore reports search engine market share for the US [comscore.com] each month. They report, for January 2011:
Yahoo is just reselling Bing now. Yahoo no longer has a search engine. So Bing's total is 29.2%. The US market has been split about like that for the last several years - Google with 2/3 of the market, Microsoft + Yahoo with 1/3, and the rest nowhere.
Outside the US, Google is dominant in most countries [searchenginewatch.com] other than China (Baidu) and Russia (Yandex).
Re:Excellent! (Score:5, Interesting)
Even when Microsoft was at the top of it's position in the 90s, it didn't have exclusive control. You could always get a Mac or use Linux.
If I decide I'm tired of Google, I can at no cost and with no limitations switch to yahoo, or Bing or one of the other engines out there. There is no cost to the customer, there are no restrictions in choosing to use other options that are equally free.
As has been pointed out on Slashdot before, you aren't the customer. You are what is being sold to advertisers. The advertisers are the Google's customers, and from their point of view, if they want to pay for search engine advertisements, Google is the monopoly equivalent of Microsoft.
I was actually shocked when I read the headline. I knew Google was popular, but the number two position is only at 4%? Wow.