The numbers aren’t staggering, but they could be an indication of things to come. In a recent comScore search report released August 2009, Microsoft’s search engine increased in U.S. Internet search traffic and market share, while Google and Yahoo! declined slightly. This influx of search traffic comes on the heels of Microsoft’s launch and branding campaign for its new search engine, Bing. Earlier this summer, Microsoft revamped its underperforming Windows Live search engine with a new name, look and functionality to better compete against rival Google.

While Microsoft has steadily maintained its third position ahead of Ask.com and AOL, it has set its sights on search engine leader Google, which reported a net income of $4.34 billion and revenue of $22.12 billion in the last financial year. While Microsoft’s online division lost $3.5 billion in the past two fiscal years, Google is expected to sell more than $20 million in online ads (associated with search keywords) for a second consecutive year.

For Bing, the challenge to cut into Google’s search traffic and market share will be quite difficult. This includes a complete shift in mindset, as Microsoft had to stop trying to beat Google at its own game and develop new features to attract search traffic. Microsoft officials believe they have implemented the features that could potentially catapult Bing into serious market contention.

For Bing to rise to contention, it had to adapt to the evolving search marketplace by implementing an innovative search process, including the way search results are displayed. Bing developed user-friendly search functionality of “guessing” what searchers are looking for and offering search results/suggestions based on the guesses. For example, Google searchers experience thousands of results listed in decreasing relevance, but Bing also displays related search categories on the left side of the results screen to suggest relevant categories or topics, such as where to buy or how to use a product. Also, video clips appear at the top of Bing search results and can be played on the results screen when a user positions a mouse over a thumbnail; this ensures a user has the needed information without having to exit the results screen.

Because Bing is so new and Google is a familiar brand, Microsoft dedicated an enormous amount of advertising money to increase brand awareness and entice clients away from ad spending on other search engines. In addition to billions spent on previous Google pursuits, Microsoft allocated approximately $100 million to promote Bing. Bing hopes its efforts will continue to pay off through 2010, when a partnership with Yahoo! goes into effect for capturing more of Google’s market share. Until then, Bing will hang its hat on steady improvements:

• comScore reported that Microsoft possessed an eight percent U.S. market share prior to Bing’s launch. After launch, this percentage grew to 8.9 through July 2009. Also, Bing’s July search requests grew by 29 million over June’s total, which is a 2.4 percent influx to 1.21 billion.
• U.S. market share for Yahoo! declined from 19.6 percent in June to 19.3 percent in July. Search volumes for Yahoo! also declined approximately five percent (130 million) to 2.63 billion in July.
• Google’s dominance is still apparent, but it declined from 65 percent in June to 64.7 percent in July. Overall search requests on Google declined by nearly 4 percent between June and July, down 352 million to 8.78 billion.
• Official numbers could be affected by the economic downturn and the summer vacation season, as fewer searches are performed. In fact, searches on the five most popular engines decreased from 14.06 billion in June to 13.58 billion in July; however, July totals are 15.5 percent higher than July 2008.