Microsoft Bing after its launch on May 28th went ahead of Yahoo in search engine market share and took the 2nd position. But this trend was not permanent, Bing slipped back to 3rd position after 2 weeks. However the permanent thing is this that Bing is increasing its market share at cost of Yahoo and Google losing their market share.
Can Bing pose a challenge for Google?
It remains to be seen if Bing falls away after the initial novelty and promotion but at first sight it looks like Microsoft is on to a winner. Steve Ballmer is quoted as saying that he wanted Microsoft to become the second biggest search engine within five years. Following the breakdown in talks to acquire Yahoo! at a cost of $40bn it looks as if he may have just achieved that with Bing much sooner and a lot cheaper than anticipated.
Bing has to grow its index, improve results quality (results are not sub standard but when compared to Google, they are not at the top of this game) and lets see what happens when Bing runs out of its $100 million advertising budget.
