Bing Beats Yahoo

Bing is now the second most popular search engine in America. Almost three years after Bing was introduced (Bing went online June 3, 2009 as a substitution for Live Search, Windows Live Search and MSN Search) it has now overtaken Yahoo's position as Google's worst competitor. An analysis by Comscore shows that Google sites led the U.S. explicit core search* market in December with 65.9 percent market share, followed by Microsoft sites with 15.1 per cent and Yahoo sites with 14.5 per cent.

Explicit Core Search* share report total U.S. – home and work locations

Total Explicit Core Search	Nov-11	Dec-11	Change
Google sites	65.4%	65.9%	0.5%
Microsoft sites	15.0%	15.1%	0.1%
Yahoo sites	15.1%	14.5%	-0.6%
ASK networks	2.9%	2.9%	0.0%
AOL	1.6%	1.6%	0.0%

Source: Comscore (January 2012)
*Explicit Core Search excludes contextually driven searches that do not reflect specific user intent to interact with the search results.

The analysis shows that from November to December 2011 Yahoo has lost 0.6 per cent of its searches. 0.5 per cent of the searches is now done at Google instead and just 0.1 per cent of the searches is now done on Bing. Unfortunately for Yahoo, this tiny percentage has the result that Bing is now the second most popular search engine in America.

See Press release by Comscore.

M-commerce Break Through This Holiday

This holiday season the mobile phone finally had it's commercial break through in America. A survey by TechBargain shows that 58 per cent of shoppers have made their Christmas shopping via their mobile phones. Of the 58 per cent 69 per cent use both the mobile browser and apps to buy products (18 per cent only use apps, 13 per cent only use a mobile browser). For those who shop with their mobile phone, 79 per cent use it to research products, 73 per cent to browse stores and 77 per cent to compare prices.

3 in 4 say ease of use
70 per cent of mobile shoppers buy digital goods, 60 per cent consumer products, 46 per cent buy services and 38 per cent consumable goods. 3 in 4 (76 per cent) say ease of use is the reason they would buy one category of products over another and 1 in 3 (34 per cent) say price point as the reason why they would buy in one category over another.

See an excerpt of TechBargain's Survey.

Facebook Is the Most Popular Social Networking Site

It's hardly any surprise that Facebook was the most popular social networking site in America in 2011 (January-October). What might surprise is that Twitter is only third on the list surpassed by Blogger. According to Nielsen do 137,664,000 unique visitors visit Facebook each month. This is more than three times the number of unique visitors visiting Blogger.

Top 10 U.S. Social Networks & Blogs

Web brand	Avg # of Unique Visitors (000) per month
Facebook	137,664
Blogger	45,712
Twitter	23,574
Wordpress	20,357
MySpace	17,935
Linkedin	17,020
Tumblr	10,879
Google+	8,207
Yahoo! Pulse	8,063
Six Apart Typepad	7,793

Source: Nielsen Wire (December 2011)

See Nielsens Tops of 2011.

Google Is the Most Popular Website in America

Google was the most visited website in America in 2011 (January-October). According to Nielsen do 153,441,000 unique visitors visit the search engine each month.

Top 10 U.S. Web Brands in 2011

Web brand	Avg # of Unique Visitors (000) per month
Google	153,441
Facebook	137,644
Yahoo!	130,121
MSN/WindowsLive/Bing	115,890
YouTube	106,692
Microsoft	83,691
AOL Media Network	74,633
Wikipedia	62,097
Apple	61,608
Ask Search Network	60,552

Source: Nielsen Wire (December 2011)

See Nielsens Tops of 2011.

Google+ Is Growing Fast

A lot of companies have been a little hesitant asking themselves: Should we make make a Google+ account or not? If you look at the numbers released by Paul Allen at Google the answer is yes. Yes, you should. Each day are 625,000 new Google+ accounts opened. Paul Allen expects that by the end of 2012 there will be more than 400 million Google+ users. In the beginning Google's social network wasn't even for companies so you couldn't even sign up. But that has changed. Now there is no reason not to join Google+.

The growth of Google+ accounts looks like this:

Date	Numbers
July 13	10 million
August 1	20.5 million
September 1	24,7 million
October 1	38 million  (Larry Page announced "more than 40m users" on Oct 13)
November 1	43 million
December 1	50 million
December 27	62 million
January 1	65.8 million (forecast)
February 1	85.2 million (forecast)

Source: Paul Allen (December 2011)

December has been especially busy for the people at Google. Almost one in four of all Google+ users (24.01%) have joined in December.

See Paul Allen's entry at Google+.