Whether the rumors about Google working overtime to reverse-engineer Microsoft’s Bing “decision engine” are true or false, one thing is certain: Bing is still booming. During the second week of its public launch, comScore data shows Microsoft continued to increase its positioning in the search market. The average daily search penetration and Bing’s share of search-result pages in the U.S. continue to rise. “This is Microsoft’s best chance so far to gain traction,” said Matt Rosoff, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft. “Microsoft has continued to improve the basic features of their search engine over time. The original search engine, MSN Search, wasn’t as good as Google, but over the years Microsoft has gotten much closer to parity and added travel search and product search and some user-interface features.” A Two-Week Streak Microsoft sites’ average daily penetration among U.S. searchers reached 16.7 percent during the week of June 8-12. That’s up a full three percentage points from the May 25-29

week before Bing’s introduction. Microsoft’s share of search-result pages in the U.S., a proxy for overall search intensity, increased to 12.1 percent during the period of June 8-12, also climbing three percentage points from May 25-29. That compares to average daily penetration among U.S. searchers from 13.8 percent during May 26-30 to 15.5 percent during June 2-6, 2009. Microsoft’s share of search-result pages in the U.S. in that period increased from 9.1 percent to 11.1 percent. “It appears that Microsoft Bing has continued to generate interest from the market for the second consecutive week,” said Mike Hurt, comScore senior vice president. “These early data reflect a continued positive market reaction to Bing in the initial stages of its launch.” Of course, Bing still has a long way to go to overtake Google — or even Yahoo, for that matter. In May, Americans conducted 14.3 billion core searches,…

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Bing Branding Boosts Microsoft’s Search Results