Bing And Google Grow At Yahoo’s Expense

Yahoo’s search engine market share in November continued to suffer at the hands of Google and Bing, according to recent statistics from comScore.

The market researcher found that Google’s share rose to 65.6 percent for the month, from 65.4 percent in October, while Bing easily crossed double digits to 10.3 percent, compared to 9.9 percent for October.

Yahoo, which has seen its search market share free fall in the last several months thanks to lost toolbar deals with HP and Acer, has dropped to 17.5 percent from 18 percent in October and 20.4 percent in November 2008.

Noting that Yahoo has lost market share for the last 10 months, BroadPoint AmTech’s Ben Schachter wrote in a research note:

“Although the company will likely point to the lingering effect of less profitable distribution deals rolling off, initial user adjustment to the new homepage, Bing’s cash-back offers, and its own internal data which indicated a different trend last month, there is no getting around the fact that the market share trend for YHOO is absolutely awful.”

Schachter said BroadPoint is not yet lowering Yahoo’s search revenue estimates, but if the trend persists, it will impact the model into 2010 and beyond.

He added that while revenue-per-search gains may mitigate the revenue decline, the company must stabilise its share loss because the Microsoft deal does not guarantee any search revenue, only RPS levels. “Therefore, search share and volume are as critical as ever.”

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said Google’s new real-time search results effort would not impact the company’s revenue in the near term, noting that monetising real-time search presents an interesting challenge.

For one, while real-time search may enhance the user experience, there is no evidence to suggest it will alter users’ web search habits. For another, it is impossible to predict what will be popular, and by extension, to sell campaigns around those hot topics.

“To fully realise the advantages of real-time search, a new type of search monetisation platform would likely be necessary, but we do not believe Google will move away from its current AdWords offering for search keyword buying in the near term,” Munster wrote in a research note.

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Bing team has made the search engine’s search history controls accessible from the Bing homepage, rather than just through results pages.

Users can click History to see their search history, clear it, and turn it off entirely with single clicks. However, even is users remove search history it is still stored in Bing’s search logs.

Bing also extended search history storage from 48 hours to four weeks – no doubt to better learn about its users to serve them relevant ads.