Bing Hits 20 Percent Of Desktop Search Share For The First Time

According to comScore’s U.S. desktop search share report for March, Microsoft’s Bing has hit 20 percent of the search market share for the first time.

The chart below shows that Google and Yahoo each slipped 0.1 percentage points from February to March, while Bing increased its share by 0.3 percentage points. At 20.1 percent, Microsoft can now say that one in five searches in the U.S. are conducted on its search engine.

Although this marks a great achievement for Microsoft, Google still has more than triple Bing’s share, at 64.4 percent.

Certainly, Yahoo’s U.S. search market share was boosted in recent months due to its default search deal with Firefox. Last December, Yahoo Sites started to tell Chrome and IE users to “upgrade” to Firefox. In January, Google showed Firefox users how to dump Yahoo as the default search engine.

In comScore’s report, the data shows that 18.9 billion explicit core searches were conducted in March, with Google Sites ranking first with 12.1 billion, which is up 11 percent from February. Microsoft Sites were second with 3.8 billion searches (up 12 percent), followed by Yahoo Sites with 2.4 billion, which is up 10 percent from the previous month.

The report also indicated in March, 65.5 percent of searches carried organic search results from Google, while 30.9 percent of searches were powered by Bing.

Yahoo, under CEO Marissa Mayer, is said to be considering ditching its Bing partnership to look into new deals that could help to push it ahead. Meanwhile, Microsoft appears to be focused on Cortana, the digital assistant Bing powers, along with other efforts to tie its services together.

Overall, there’s no question that Google remains at the top of the U.S. desktop search market. However, as search evolves and becomes more local, there are new opportunities for other tech companies to gain a portion of the market share.

It’s important to note that comScore’s report only shows part of the story, as mobile search on smartphones and tablets is a rapidly growing market that is not illustrated in these figures.