The monthly U.S. search stats from comScore are out for June and Microsoft continues to grow its search share while Yahoo keeps sliding.
Google held the top spot with 66.7 percent market share with no change from last month. Microsoft Bing, however, saw a 0.5 percent uptick to 17.9 percent while Yahoo fell 0.5 percentage points down to 11.4 percent.
Microsoft Bing’s market share has grown from 15.6 percent last year to the 17.9 percent, as Yahoo fell from 13 percent in June 2012 to 11.4 percent last month.
Microsoft provides the underlying technology for Yahoo’s search engine and search ads, but the partnership between the companies hasn’t paid off like the companies had hoped.
Microsoft’s search advertising group says it’s starting to wring more revenue out of the Internet search ads that it’s serving as part of its partnership with Yahoo — despite recently needing to extend, for another year, its commitment to cover revenue shortfalls experienced by Yahoo under the arrangement.
Yahoo has been “quietly” trying to find a way out of the Microsoft search deal, without any luck so far. A Wall Street Journal report said that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, the former Google exec, has been seeking to end the pact since she joined Yahoo last year.
Bing, meanwhile, has been gaining traction lately. Twitter recently began using the search engine to translate tweets, and last month, Apple announced it would incorporate web search results from Bing into its voice-enabled Siri personal assistant in iOS 7. Microsoft is also now using Deep Neural Networks (DNN) to improve the speed and accuracy of its Bing voice search and voice-to-text features.
And finally, Microsoft said it will extend its Bing advertising platform to the new search experience in Windows 8.1, serving up ads as part of the “Smart Search” results displayed to users inside the PC and tablet operating system.
Previously on GeekWire: Microsoft: Bing Ads to be integrated deeply into Windows 8.1 ‘Smart Search’
