Tuesday, Sep 22, 2009    Text size: 

The upstart search engine from tech giant Microsoft has been saturating the market with a $100 million marketing campaign that’s showing dividends. Since its May launch, Bing has grown about 1.3 percent, laying claim to 9.3 percent of search engine traffic.

Meanwhile, Yahoo’s share has dropped 0.8 percent, and mighty Google’s stranglehold on the market has relaxed to 64.6 of searches in the United States.

Those numbers may sound small, but according to leading tech analyst Erick Schonfeld, it’s a big deal.

“Bing showed the only significant gain, while everyone else stayed relatively flat,” he said. “That $100 million marketing campaign must be working, or maybe it’s the improvements Bing is making to the search experience, or maybe it’s both. Whatever it is, it is translating into nearly a half-point market share gain every month for the past three months.”

Bing’s improvements include a more attractive landing page and fast, accurate results that have been getting solid reviews since its launch. In addition, Bing recently rolled out a visual search engine for images.

But as any savvy adult industry professional knows, Bing has been surprisingly friendly to adult since its inception. Bing video search has emerged as one of the best adult search tools on the planet, and Microsoft added a porn-specific subdomain at Explicit.Bing.net to help system administrators easily filter out adult content.

Some tech pundits even suspected that Microsoft was intentionally courting fans of adult entertainment by purchasing the keyword "pornography," so that when users did a Google search for the term, they'd see a text advertisement for Bing. Microsoft roundly denied the claim.

Bing and Yahoo search merged over the summer, with plans to launch a new, unified competitor to Google in early 2010. Under the deal, Bing would power Yahoo search.