Google is now actively losing market share to Bing and Yahoo – both in the US and elsewhere. Here’s all the data (and what it means)…
Bing vs Google 2024: Key Takeaways
- Google has lost around 10% of its share of the search market, while Microsoft’s Bing has gained.
- Google’s search experience has been negatively impacted by updates, ads, search widgets, and the invasive presence of SGE at the top of the page.
- Users are switching to Bing to get their queries answered due to Google’s declining user experience.
- Recent updates in Google Search have made it harder to find definitive answers, while Bing seems to provide what users want.
- Although a 10% – or 2% – shift may seem small, it equates to a significant number of searches when considering the billions of queries Google serves daily.
- Losing 2% of Google’s average 9 billion daily searches means Bing is gaining 180 million more searches every day.
Google Market Share Stats 2024
Data compiled by GS Statcounter suggests that Google lost around 10% of its market share in 2019. Bing and Yahoo, meanwhile, both made gains with their respective search engines.
According to the data, Bing now controls 13% of the US search market, while Yahoo’s share grew threefold to 3.06%. Google’s market share is now reported to be 86.99%.
| Search Engine | Market Share |
|---|---|
| 86.99% | |
| Bing | 5.8% |
| Yahoo! | 3.06% |
| YANDEX | 1.61% |
| Baidu | 1.08% |
| DuckDuckGo | 0.51% |
SimilarWeb suggests Google’s decline in the U.S. may not be as severe as initially reported based on its data from March 2024. But its market share is going down – that’s the main takeaway here.
And the reason for this? Quality. Google’s search results aren’t what they used to be – I covered this in more detail inside my op-ed piece, Google Search is Broken.
Whether Google’s loss of market share is 10% or 2%, it is still a significant moment in search (and Google’s history). Is it losing its monopoly on search?
Bing Search is Growing At The Expense of Google
Why is Google now losing market share? What has changed? There’s plenty of theories – I have some of my own; Google is now too reliant on machine learning and AI, it has lost its finesse inside the black box that is AI – but the sentiment, generally speaking, appears to be pretty simple: the search results suck.
Update after update and the now distracting amount of ads, search widgets, and the ever invasive presence of SGE taking up too much room at the top of the page is clearly having a negative impact on Google’s UX experience.
Google has almost over 80% of the search market whereas the rest of the search engines like Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, YANDEX, etc. settle with the remaining percentage. Microsoft has focused more on Bing and they have collaborated with OpenAI and implemented the ChatGPT capabilities in the search. With the recent updates in Google Search, it has become comparatively hard to find definitive answers to searches, Bing seems to have gained by providing what the user wants.
Source
The result? More and more users – myself included – are switching to Bing to get their queries answered. I’ve written about this at length and, for the longest time, it is something I never believed I’d see – Google failing at its core business.
2% of 9 Billion is A LOT of Searches
But here we are in 2024 and Google is now losing market share to Bing. Granted, 2% isn’t a lot. But when you crunch the kind of numbers Google is doing in the US, 2% starts to look like a much bigger problem for the world’s number one search engine.
Google serves – on average – around 9 billion searches a day. Losing even 1% of that is a lot of eyeballs. 2% equates to 180000000 more searches done in Bing every day.
Bing Ain’t The Only Game In Town
For the more privacy focussed, meaning people that don’t want to feed the Big Tech Data Machine, there are alternative search engines outside of Google and Microsoft’s as well.
DuckDuckGo leverages over 300 sources (including Bing) to build its index. Brave Search has developed its own, completely proprietary search engine free from Bing and Google’s index. Neither are at the calibre of Google or Bing yet, but they’re getting there.
I’ve been using a combination of Brave Search, DuckDuckGo, and Bing for the past 12 months and I can honestly say I do not miss Google search.
Back around the end of 2023, following multiple algorithm updates, Google’s SERPs just started not working. Whatever I was looking for, I didn’t find. It felt more like Google was showing me stuff it thought I should be looking at instead of what I actually wanted.
And that’s no good, not from a searcher’s perspective.
Chuck in its dirty deals with Reddit, the fact that ancient forums and god-awful sites like Quora are clogging up the top spots for big, informational keywords and it is easy to see why more and more people are moving away from Google search.
