Google Holds Ground Against Bing Yahoo

In the past few months we’ve reported on the gradual, but consistent, headway Bing/Yahoo has been making against Google.  However, Google has, for the past couple of months now been able to hold their ground.  Bing continues to see gains according to the most recent report from Comscore.com.

Big Gains for Bing:
In the past year (June 2010 – June 2011) Bing has risen from 11% of the total market share to 14.4%, a 31% increase.  During the same time Google has dropped from 66.2% to 65.5%, a mere 1% decrease, and they have held their ground the past couple of months.  Yahoo, whose organic search results are now delivered by Bing, has gone from 16.7% to 15.9%, a nearly 5% decrease.

Combined, in the past year Bing/Yahoo has increased their market share by nearly 10% (27.7% up to 30.3%).  While some of that increase comes at the expense of Google, Ask and AOL took major hits as well.

Current Situation:
Google continues to dominate the search world, though Bing/Yahoo have made impressive growth over the past year.  Unfortunately, a substantial part of that growth has come at the expense of the 4th and 5th largest search sites, Ask and AOL.  Considering that Bing now supplies the organic search results for Yahoo, that means that there are really only two big players in the game right now…not much of a variety.

What do you think?

Would you like to see some other search engines have a larger share of the search market or do you think it doesn’t matter how many search engines there are as long as you can find what you want?