Microsoft Bing's market share appears to have grown by a mere 0.1 percent in September. Under the covers though, Bing is starting to become a bona fide competitor to market leader Google, according to the latest Web analytics from comScore.
And beyond the sheer numbers, expanding coalitions, growing controversy and rumors of buyouts are also muddying the waters this month. How it all works out will doubtless command the attention of SEO consultants, search marketers and search ad buyers.
On the surface, little seems changed about comScore's (NASDAQ: SCOR)September U.S. search engine numbers in comparison to August.
For instance, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) search sites picked up 0.7 percentage points of market share in September to reach 66.1 percent. Microsoft's even more modest growth brought its share up to 11.2 percent, while Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) lost 0.7 percentage points, ending the month with 16.7 percent.
However, September was also the first full month that Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) Bing infrastructure provided search infrastructure for Yahoo's sites. Microsoft's deal with Yahoo to provide search and advertising services in return for sharing in the revenue is slated to run for 10 years.
Additionally, Google not only provides search infrastructure for its own sites, but also for AOL and most of Ask's sites.
"In September, 69.1 percent of searches carried organic search results from Google, while 23.5 percent of searches were powered by Bing organic results," comScore said in a statement.
Then there's the controversy that's been brewing about Google Instant, which "intelligently" guesses at what the user is going to search for as he types and tries to auto-complete the search in real-time.
September was the first month that comScore took into account the impact of Google Instant, which was introduced Sept. 8, according to Cameron Meierhoefer, the company's executive vice president of analytics.
"The page is dynamically updated as the user continues typing, which could potentially generate a large number of result pages that may or may not be of user interest," Meierhoefer said in a blog post.
That's part of the problem, according to Yahoo, which took the unusual step of penning a blog post in an effort to clarify the comScore figures.
"When a user starts typing, and pauses for a few seconds without finishing their thought, should that be counted as a search?" asked Shashi Seth, senior vice president of Yahoo Search and Marketplaces, in a post to theYahoo Search Blog.
"Looking at comScore's report, it appears to me that a majority of Google's query growth in September (a month in which Google Instant was live for 20 days) came from precisely these kinds of interactions. I bet even the folks at Google are mystified by this kind of accounting," Seth added.
It's not the first controversy having to do with the introduction of new search features to roil the waters of the search marketplace recently.
In June, comScore came under fire for what some observers considered a method of fudging the search numbers with Bing's and Yahoo's new "slide show" features, which change as the user moves the cursor over them. The analytics firm responded by inaugurating a new streamlined set of criteria it calls "core search" this summer.
Microsoft brings Facebook to Bing
And that's not all that's bubbling in the world of search technologies.
Wednesday, Microsoft and Facebook announced closer ties between the Bing search engine and the popular social network.
"We will enable a great search experience for people queries by bringing in information from your Facebook friends and people who share networks with you, and we will show you what your friends have liked (using Facebook's public "like" platform) as you navigate through search results in Bing," Satya Nadella, senior vice president of Microsoft's Online Services Division, said in a post to the Bing Community blog.
The move promises a tighter integration between Microsoft and Facebook going forward, building on a prior ad partnership between the two companies.
"We think it's time for a real, robust, persistent social signal. Facebook has led a transformation of the Internet already. It has reached and passed 500 million members, and the amount of content created inside Facebook each day is staggering," Nadella said.
"All these questions are best answered by a richer set of signals that take into account not only relationships between data but relationships between people."
If that weren't enough, there are also rumors that surfaced Thursday in a number of business news outlets, including the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg news, that AOL, in concert with several private equity firms, may put together a bid to acquire Yahoo.
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