Bing gains on its rivals

Year-end figures released by digital market research agency comScore showed a promising step forward for Bing who gained 0.3% in the search market. This was juxtaposed against a slip of 0.1% for its chief rivals Google and Yahoo!.

While the statistics do not affect the overall ranking – Google remains top with 64.3%, followed by Yahoo on 19.3% market share – it does suggest that Bing’s intensive approach to enhancements this year, including a partnership with Facebook, is starting to pay off.

In October 2010, Bing integrated with the social media giant to create a new approach to social search. The move saw Bing / Facebook users receive recommendations based on their friends’ likes  during searches, so looking for information on a certain film would bring up friends’ opinions or recommendations of similar titles. They also applied the same strategy to people searches, providing friend suggestions direct in search results.

Whether this upward trend can continue remains to be seen, and it’s a big gap to close between Bing in third place and Google in first with well over half of the market share. The leader of the pack also unveiled several enhancements during 2010, most notably Google Instant, which many industry analysts believe will also have a positive long-term effect on Google’s market share by greatly increasing the speed of service for users.

So is Bing’s market lift an indication that social search is the next goalpost? Or can improvements to traditional search, such as Google Instant and Preview, continue to keep the market leader in pole position? There’s everything to play for in 2011.