Is Bing Really Biting Into Google?

Everyone's buzzed about Bing, of course, and at first glance, the news from Reuters that Bing has pushed Microsoft's (MSFT) share of the search market to 12.1 percent should have Larry and Sergey a little spooked. But as PC World reporter JR Raphael points out, things aren't quite that simple.

That 12.1 percent figure comes courtesy of comScore, the country's most widely-used metric for calculating search in the United States. It tallies Bing's share of the market in the second week of June and compares it with numbers for the month of May, in which Microsoft had just 8 percent of search, while Google racked up a solid 65 percent. But notice anything missing? Like, perhaps, Google's (GOOG) numbers for the same period in June?

Raphael sure did, and called comScore to get Google's stats, but a company spokesperson said that those numbers wouldn't be available till the end of the month, when all the search figures would be crunched and released. So Raphael turned to two different Web metrics companies, Compete and StatCounter, and asked for their Google numbers during the same period. And their research indicates that while Bing has certainly grown in market share, so has Google—by one percent and 0.43 percent, respectively. In other words, said Compete executive Jeremy Crane, people may be taking Bing out for a spin, but "they're not abandoning their primary search engine."

That doesn't mean Google isn't worried, of course. Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan notices that Google has slapped a new link on its usually clean home page, inviting people to explore all the nifty enhanced searches for shopping, travel, etc., that Google has always offered, but Bing has made the centerpiece of its new engine. As Sullivan writes, Google has never had to market itself, relying on superior technology and word of mouth. This new link may signal that those days are over.