Friday 5th June 2009

New York (US) and Dublin (Ireland); Friday, 5th June, 2009: Microsoft's Bing overtook Yahoo! as the number two search engine in the United States and worldwide Thursday (4th June) according to data from StatCounter Global Stats. StatCounter says that Bing grabbed market share from Google.

"It remains to be seen if Bing falls away after the initial novelty and promotion but at first sight it looks like Microsoft is on to a winner," commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. "Steve Ballmer is quoted as saying that he wanted Microsoft to become the second biggest search engine within five years. Following the breakdown in talks to acquire Yahoo! at a cost of $40bn it looks as if he may have just achieved that with Bing much sooner and a lot cheaper than anticipated."

StatCounter's analysis for Thursday finds that in the US Bing leapfrogged Yahoo to take second place on 16.28%. Yahoo! has 10.22%. Google still commands the US search engine market with 71.47%.

StatCounter data globally finds that Bing at 5.62% has taken a narrow lead over Yahoo! (5.13%). Google worldwide retains 87.62% of the market. See https://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-ww-daily-20090529-20090604

StatCounter, which provides free website traffic analysis, is one of the largest web analytics companies in the world monitoring in excess of ten billion pageloads per month. In March it launched StatCounter Global Stats, a free online service which captures market share battles of search engines, browsers and operating systems including mobile.

The StatCounter Global Stats research data is based on four billion pageloads per month. Other regional and country breakdowns can be viewed at: http://gs.statcounter.com

Ends

For interview, photo or further information please contact:

Kerri Crowley, Simpson Financial & Technology PR
Tel: +353 1 260 5300 or kerri@simpsonftpr.ie

About StatCounter

StatCounter, a free online visitor stats tool, was founded in 1999. It offers its members the chance to grow and improve their online businesses by allowing them to monitor the number of hits to their website; the geographical location of visitors; the various pages a visitor views; keywords used to find the site plus other features.

StatCounter currently has over two million members and tracks in excess of ten billion pageloads per month over its network of three million websites. For information on this real-time, user-friendly, and free visitor stats tool, please visit www.statcounter.com