Despite the growth of Bing during 2010, Google continues to gain ground in the search market. On the 14th January 2010 comScore reported that Google finished 2010 handling 69.4% of the US online search queries. This includes 3.4% of search engines who are powered by Google results. Bing made a slight increase, up by 0.2% to 12%, while Yahoo!, AOL and Ask lost market share. The results are very interesting considering the growth of social media and sites such as Facebook. Facebook usage (including the amount of time spent on facebook) exceeded that of Google for most of 2010 and with the amount of time users spend using Facebook, and the search bar (partially driven by Bing) so easily accessible, one has to wonder how Google continues to gain ground. Is it simply that most users are unaware of their ability to search the web directly from Facebook, the fact that Google search is so deeply ingrained in people’s mind they don’t consider using much else, or is it simply that many users simply don’t find the quality of results in Bing search as good as Google’s? With the recent partnership between Facebook and Bing to use ‘Social Signals’ to drive improved personalised search results in Bing, we may see a big shift in this during 2011. One thing is sure, 2011 will be a very interesting year as two of the biggest players on the web, Google and Facebook continue to fight for more users.
