Tuesday 1st March 2011

Boston, USA & Dublin, Ireland; Tuesday, 1st March, 2011: The Bing search engine overtook Yahoo! for the first time worldwide in January and increased its lead in February according to web analytics company, StatCounter. Its research arm StatCounter Global Stats finds that globally Bing reached 4.37% in February ahead of Yahoo! at 3.93%. Both trail far behind Google's 89.94% of the global search engine market.

In the United States Yahoo! at 9.74% still retains its lead over Bing at 9.03%. Google's share in the US is 79.63%. In July 2009 Microsoft announced an agreement whereby Bing would power the Yahoo! search technology. This has been implemented in the US, Canada, Australia, Brazil and Mexico.

"It is significant that Bing overtook Yahoo! globally for the first time on a monthly basis but it remains a tough battle to claw back Google's market share," commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. "Although Google dipped below the 90% mark in February worldwide for the first time since August 2009 it shows little sign of losing its global dominance any time soon."

StatCounter, which specialises in website visitor analysis for organisations and bloggers, provides free lifetime stats and free detailed analysis on the latest 500 hits. Members can upgrade to access more detailed stats from $5 a month.

StatCounter Global Stats are based on aggregate data collected on a sample of over 15 billion page views per month from across the StatCounter network of more than three million websites.

StatCounter, which provides free website traffic information, publishes search engine stats in its StatCounter Global Stats, a free online research tool. It also monitors internet market share battles including browsers, Social Media and operating systems including mobile.

Ends

Press queries to: Kerri Crowley, Simpson Financial & Technology PR
T: +353 1 260 5300 or E: kerri@simpsonftpr.ie

For individual country analysis go to:
https://gs.statcounter.com/#search_engine-ww-monthly-201002-201102

Further information on our analysis is available at:
https://gs.statcounter.com/faq

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. For information on this real-time, user-friendly, and free visitor stats tool, please visit http://statcounter.com.