Internet desktop search statistics for the month of February have been released by comScore and they show that Bing is doing remarkably well. Over 30% of desktop web searches are powered by Bing, including searches from both Bing and Yahoo!, with one in five searches coming directly through Microsoft websites.
Microsoft’s range of sites including Bing and MSN accounted for 19.8% and 19.7% in February and January respectively. Yahoo sites, whose searches are powered by Bing, accounted for 12.8% of desktop searches in February and 13% in January.
To put some of these percentages into raw data, there were 17 billion “explicit core searches” in February alone. While Google sites led the way, as many expected, with 11 billion searches, Microsoft sites had 3.4 billion searches with Yahoo coming in a strong third with 2.2 billion.
At the moment, Yahoo search is powered by Bing though the head of Yahoo has expressed feelings implying that partnership may come to an end eventually. That would be a big blow to Microsoft’s search numbers but even without Yahoo websites Microsoft commands a large share of desktop searches.
While Microsoft sites’ search traffic is still less than a third of Google sites’, it’s obvious that Bing is doing much better than how they are portrayed in many jokes. Notably, these figures only reflect desktop traffic. It would be interesting to see how Microsoft sites stack up against sites such as Google when it comes to mobile search traffic.
