Ever since Google began dominating the search engine market, many up-and-coming search engines have come and gone. But as far as we can remember, none have stormed the market with as much vigor as Microsoft’s Bing has in this past year. In fact, Bing’s driving force seems largely to compete with Google to be the world’s largest and most popular search engine—a bold move to say the least.
Right from the get-go, Microsoft made clear intentions it wanted to make a huge push in the search engine market when it decided to rebrand its current Live Search. On June 1, 2009, Microsoft launched Bing, and announced that they would spend between $80 million and $100 million on a marketing campaign for its latest search engine. So far it seems to have been a fairly successful strategy, as Bing grew its US search engine market share to 13%, putting it in 3rd place just slightly behind Yahoo!. With the Microsoft-Yahoo! deal already finalized and in transition, Bing will soon power Yahoo! Search making it, at last, a viable competitor with Google. That would give Bing a 26% market share compared to Google’s 65%, though with Bing’s current pace of growth, a market share of 33% is very possible in the near future. Bing’s growing market share is especially important to Search Engine Marketing (SEM) professionals, as a competitive market may mean lower prices for Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising, leading to a greater number of businesses adding SEM to their advertising model.
In February 2010. the U.S. Department of Justice and European Commission approved the