Google Loses Search Share to MSN and Microsoft Bing

Google Sites had about 62.6 percent of the market, down 1.1 percent from 63.7 percent in May. Yahoo and Microsoft's Bing both jumped 0.6 percent, to 18.9 percent and 12.7 percent, respectively.
Rounding out the top five were the Ask Network, which stayed flat at 3.6 percent, and AOL, which was down 0.1 percent to 2.2 percent.

"Both Yahoo Sites and Microsoft Sites have experienced gains due in part to the continued utilization of contextual search approaches that tie content and related search results together," comScore said in a statement.

Americans conducted 16.4 billion core searches in June, up 3 percent from May. Google had 10.3 billion of those searches, a 1 percent increase, followed by Yahoo with 3.1 billion, and Microsoft with 2.1 billion, a jump of 7 percent and 8 percent, respectively.

Ask had 584 million searches, up 1 percent, while AOL increased 2 percent to 368 million.

In terms of expanded search, which includes searches for maps, local directories, and user-generated video sites, Google Sites had 14.6 billion searches overall. Almost 11 billion of those were for Google.com, while about 3.7 billion were for YouTube.

Microsoft's Bing had about 2.2 billion searches, up 5 percent from last month. Facebook had 621 million searches, up 2 percent, while MySpace had 292 million, down 5 percent.( source: Yahoo News,Chloe Albanesius - PC Magazine)

Bing and SEO

With microsoft bing on the scene. It may be worth bearing in mind the some of the aspects that influence indexing in bing:

• Multi-threaded SERP design brings up many more pages that will be in line with the searcher's primary keywords than would have surfaced in a single-threaded SERP list

• Keyword searches can be conducted with Quick Tabs that present branches of the parent keyword. This surfaces many websites that rank highly for those keyword combinations - content-rich sites will out-convert sites with lesser relevant text

• Bing removes duplicate results from categorised results lists, which allows other, lower ranked pages to be shown in the categorised results on its SERP - hence the poor quality of some results.

• Bing makes it easier to compete for broad terms, because it surfaces more categories automatically, increasing the number of results on the page and generating more content - SEO strategies will have to adapt to optimize content for these categories.

SEO and MSN

SEO for MSN requires that a site be structured well with a distinct theme throughout and many inbound links. The advantage an SEO has while optimizing a site for MSN is that MSN tends to pick up and credit new content and inbound links very quickly.