Although earlier reports seemed to indicate that Bing’s challenge to reigning internet search king Google had died off almost as soon as it had begun, a new report from comScore seems to indicate that Microsoft’s search engine has not fallen as far as previously thought.
The first reports, from Experian’s Hitwise and research firm StatCounter, indicated that Bing had lost between 5 percent and 12 percent of its market share. Some experts said at the time that this marked the end of Bing as a challenger to Google, a development search engine optimization (SEO) professionals watched closely
However, the comScore report seems to indicate that, while Bing hasn’t aggressively expanded its market share, it has at least held steady at about 9.4 percent of September internet searches. David Karnstedt, CEO of search advertising firm Efficient Frontier, told the New York Times that "it feels that things are starting to stabilize," referring both to Microsoft’s search engine in particular and the search engine optimization (SEO) market in general.
The latter piece of news is also good for Bing’s rivals, however. The Times reports that Goldman Sachs improved its forecast for Google, and the company’s stock has been steadily outperforming market averages.
