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As Bing Grows, Microsoft Looking at Further Search Expansion

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Microsoft is fighting hard to win marketshare from Google and the other players in the lucrative search industry. Google remains the top dog with over 60% of the search market, while Microsoft brings up a distant third place to the Google juggernaut.
Microsoft says that Bing has yet to be fully pushed on the international market. According to Microsoft’s Charles Songhurst, Bing has been available internationally, but has had no marketing to this point.

Songhurst said, “We haven’t launched Bing in International. It’s active and usable, but it hasn’t had the marketing push behind it. And what we’ve found is that that marketing push makes a huge difference.”

He continued saying, “I think the other thing we’re beginning to find is that the search market is more differentiated, and less homogeneous than we thought. What we’re increasingly seeing is that different consumers have different styles and tastes. And Bing is about particular tastes and styles, it’s more focused results, you get more information per result, you get more details.”

After the introduction of Bing in America, Microsoft reportedly spent in the area of $80 to $100 million in advertising to promote the new search site. So far Bing has racked up some growth in search for Microsoft. EWeek reports that in August Bing has 10.7% of searches in the U.S. while Google had 64.6%. Yahoo had 16% of searches in America for the same month. Bing was able to post a growth rate of 22.1% compared to the previous month.

Microsoft feels that Bing has the potential to grab another 10 to 20 points in market share for search across the global search space. The Yahoo search deal will also help Bing grow significantly. Between the search traffic that Yahoo generates and Bing’s own traffic, Microsoft has the potential to grab as much as 30% of the search market. That is still a bit less than half the total search market that Google enjoys.

_© 2009, DailyTech