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Google flings Bing into search engine bin

Not! even! Yahoo! can! help! us! now! master!

A worrying trend for Microsoft's search engine was revealed last Friday: Bing's market share remained flat over the last two months while Google clawed back web surfers.

According to ComScore, Bing is struggling to add users – despite Microsoft's expensive efforts to make the search engine a serious contender against the Chocolate Factory.

Bing's market share is still hovering around the 15 per cent mark in the US, the online metrics firm said.

Since Microsoft debuted Bing as its rebranded search engine in June 2009, its popularity has nearly doubled from 8.4 per cent then to 14.8 per cent today.

However, the software vendor's search engine has arguably plateaued out, while Google is steadily increasing its market share again.

The Larry Page-run company had an "explicit core search" audience in the United States of 65.6 per cent in October this year, compared with 65.3 per cent a month earlier.

And, more significantly, that figure means that Google may have seen a temporary blip in its search prowess online with the arrival of Bing, but its dominance is on the march again. Which is, of course, bad news for Microsoft.

In June, Redmond recorded annual online revenues of $2.52bn and an operating loss of $2.56bn. The company said at the time that its search pact with Yahoo! and increased traffic acquisition costs had attributed to Microsoft's online wing proving to be a loss-making venture for the firm.

Worse still, while Google is seeing a gentle resurgence, Yahoo! is on the slide.

The Purple Palace – bereft of a CEO – is continuing on the downward trajectory. Its share of search engine fans fell 0.3 per cent to 15.2 per cent in October compared with 15.5 per cent a month earlier, according to ComScore.

But it was Google – and not Microsoft – that was the beneficiary of Yahoo!'s market share slip. ®

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