So, Bing, Microsoft’s answer to Google, has been with us a little over a year (though it seems much, much longer than that.) So it’s unsurprising that the upstart with deep pockets remains number three in terms of search volume, after Google (which has a staggering 84.8% of the volume) and Yahoo! (which has 6.19%). Bing, for its part, has 3.24% of the traffic volume.
Things got a little more interesting last year, when, a month or so after the Bing unveiling, Microsoft and Yahoo! Announced a deal where Bing would power Yahoo’s search functionality. Yahoo! will get to keep 88% of ad revenue revenue from all search ad sales on its site for the first five years.
The agreement also extended to the search marketing side of things. In February or so, we started seeing the advent of Microsoft Adcenter and Yahoo! Sponsored Search sliding together into one.
That agreement is currently going live, so a lot of these things are going to be hashed out in front of our very eyes.
I don’t really care to opine about the Bing powered search over on Yahoo! (although Bing apparently excels at online porn). Hopefully now we’ll see some improvement with Yahoo’s Sponsored Search Offerings, where things had been seeming a little creaky as compared to the other two—especially Google. Time will tell on that, I suppose.