Microsoft has been a growing but distant second in the search engine market after reaching a 20% U.S. share milestone earlier this year. Back in July this led David Pann, Bing Ads’ General Manager, to predict Bing’s search queries to grow by 10% to 15% by September with the then yet to be released Windows 10 operating system just around the corner.
As noted by Gregg Keizer of Computerworld, that prediction has not come to pass according to comScore’s most recent report on the search engine market. In fact, Bing’s volume of search queries increased by just 1% in August, well shy of the predicted 10% to 15% gain with only a few weeks to go. In terms of search market share, Bing only grew by 0.2% from 20.4% to 20.6% in August.
The August report by comScore is only for the US market, and to be fair Pann’s prediction was most likely in reference to global share. But as Keizer points out in his article, Windows 10 has higher share of desktop operating systems in the US compared to abroad. The logic flows that if the predicted surge of Bing traffic was to be due to Windows 10, and yet it didn’t materialize in the US where Windows 10 is stronger, it is even less likely to have materialized overseas due to lower adoption rates abroad.
While this one prediction has failed to come true, there are still room for growth as Windows 10 and Microsoft Edge are still just getting started both in terms of adoption rates and feature sets. Not to mention Microsoft’s partnership with AOL is still freshly minted and has potential to contribute to Bing’s share over the long run as it diffuses across their network of sites.
