Michelle's E-Marketing Blog

While researching the topic of “online search methods” to write a blog about, I encountered several articles referencing social media, search engine optimization (SEO), paid search, and various ways to improve the chances YOUR website will be visited. However, it was the article “Bing’s Success and the Future of Search” regarding search engine market share which interested me the most.

The article states that the search engine Bing, powered by Microsoft, is now the second most used search engine with 13.9% search share as of August 2010. What surprised me at first was that Google had a reported 65.1% share. Perhaps naïve, I had imagined it would be somewhere over 80%. People really still use Ask Jeeves (or ask.com now) and Yahoo!? But what shocked me even more relates to my original finding regarding Bing. The Bing search engine toolbar is automatically installed on Internet Explorer; therefore, I’m going to make the assumption that a large portion of the people using Bing are also using Internet Explorer. This means that people must still be actively using Internet Explorer. *Insert shocked face here*. Why? I’m confused; do people not know that Firefox and Google Chrome exist? I hope for their sake that they are enlightened soon and do not have to continue using Explorer, or as I refer to it as “a great browser for downloading Firefox”.

Afterthought: Also, Bing just partnered with Yahoo! which, according to the article, “puts it in the position of being the only real competition for Google’s search volume.” Who knows, maybe one day Google will be a thing of the past like poor Jeeves.