Microsoft’s search engine market share passes 20% for the first time

Microsoft’s Bing isn’t the most popular search engine around, but—at least according to the latest from comScore—it’s gaining ground slowly but surely. For the first time, Microsoft sites have surpassed the 20% milestone, meaning more than one fifth of overall search traffic is now owned by the Redmond, Washington company…

Google of course led the market in March with the majority 64.4%, sitting at just 0.1 percentage points less than the previous month. Microsoft is up 0.3 points over February, now at 20.1%, while Yahoo is down 0.1 points to 12.7%. The bottom two, made up by Ask and AOL, have stayed steady at 1.8% and 1.1% market share, respectively.

comScore also took a look at raw search numbers:

18.9 billion explicit core searches were conducted in March, with Google Sites ranking first with 12.1 billion (up 11 percent). Microsoft Sites ranked second with 3.8 billion searches (up 12 percent), followed by Yahoo Sites with 2.4 billion (up 10 percent), Ask Network with 332 million (up 10 percent) and AOL, Inc. with 203 million (up 10 percent).

While the numbers do come from two completely different sources (and therefore this comparison should be taken with a grain of salt), today’s stats are definitely striking considering it was only in December of 2014 that StatCounter reported Google still having more than 75% foothold on the search market. Bing was sitting at 12.5% according to those numbers.