Bing slows in race against Google

BOSTON, USA: Microsoft's Bing search market share in the US grew by just 0.23 percent in August to 9.64 percent, the slowest monthly growth rate since its launch, according to analysis conducted by web analytics firm StatCounter.

The firm's research arm StatCounter Global Stats also finds that Bing and Yahoo! combined declined slightly in August to 20.14 percent from 20.36 percent in July.

"Perhaps a little worrying for Microsoft is that when you analyse the weekly data, Bing peaked for the week 10th - 16th August at 10.98 percent and has declined since then," commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. Google increased its search market share slightly in the US in August from 77.54 percent to 77.83 percent.

Globally Microsoft and Yahoo! combined took 8.42 percent of the search market in August, a decline of 0.35 percent on July's figure (8.77 percent). Google remains the dominant force in the global search market with 89.57 percent in August (89.23 percent in July).

Data is based on an analysis of 1.073 billion search engine referring clicks (272 million from the US) which were collected in July and August from the StatCounter network of over three million websites.

StatCounter, which provides free website traffic analysis, is one of the largest web analytics companies in the world monitoring in excess of ten billion pageloads per month.