Microsoft’s search share leaps

Bing, launched to great fanfare two weeks ago, has helped push its owner Microsoft's search market share up from 9.1 per cent to 12.1 per cent. The improvement goes some way to justifying the $100m the company spent on the project, but chief executive Steve Ballmer resisted the temptation to put too positive spin on the numbers in a speech yesterday in Chicago, saying "We have had some very good initial response. But I don't want to over-set expectations. We are going to have to be tenacious and keep up the pace of innovation over a long period of time."

Shortly after the launch there were reports that Microsoft had reached a 16.28 per cent market share, pushing Yahoo! into third place in the search rankings. However by June 11th it appeared to have fallen back into third place itself. Analysts are now waiting for a whole month of statistics before delivering their verdict on the search engine's success.

For the whole month of May, industry tracker ComScore said Microsoft lost 0.2 per cent to eight per cent, with Yahoo! also falling, by 0.3 per cent to 20.1 per cent and Google consolidating its dominant position with an increase of 0.85 per cent to 65 per cent of the market. However Ballmer noted that Windows took nine years to become a hit from its launch in 1983.

WHAT THEY SAID:Gavin Clarke, The Register: "Ballmer's got a lot riding on Bing: He's signed off on billions in additional R&D and M&A to build Bing and Microsoft's search platform and online properties, at a time when most mature organizations are just milking the franchise. That's something many investors would actually prefer to see. He recently topped that off with a $100m ad campaign for Bing at a time when most companies are cutting their marketing and advertising spend, especially in the IT sector."

Jeremy Crane, managing director of industry tracking company Compete, in PC World: "What we've seen is essentially a lift in the number of users going to Microsoft search. What's indicated to us is that people are trying Bing out. They're not abandoning their primary search engine, though – they're more likely just using Bing in tandem with it." ·