No 'Bing boom' yet: ComScore data confirms Bing's slow growth

Earlier this month, the first sampling data from Web researcher StatCounter suggested that Microsoft's new Bing search service was gathering momentum, albeit slowly. Today, the first broader-based data analysis from ratings service comScore closely confirms what the early samples were saying: During the month of June, Microsoft-hosted searches including Bing for US customers numbered just 30 million more than for Microsoft-hosted searches including Windows Live the month before. This is during a month when just over 14 billion general searches were processed by the nation's top five providers.

The news looks a little better for Microsoft when you consider that June was a slow month for searches overall -- down by 2% among the nation's top 5 providers, and flat overall when advanced searches and the sites that facilitate them, are entered into the picture. So while Google's general search traffic declined by 2% in keeping with the general trend, its US usage share overall stayed flat at 65%. Bing gained 0.4% of usage share over Windows Live last June -- better than flat, but not the "Bing Boom" that some made it out to be.

While Bing gained 30 million general searches over its predecessor in June, Facebook gained 16 million expanded searches (for specific classes of data) in the same period. Google processed 13.1 billion (with a "b") such searches over that period.

What had been perceived as a gulf between the early sampling statistics produced by services such as StatCounter and NetApplications, and the more conventionally processed broad base of data from services such as comScore, may actually be closing. Early StatCounter numbers suggested Bing was processing as much as 8.23% of US queries, with a share increase of 0.42%. Today's comScore tabulation shows Bing with 8.39% of general US queries, and 4.7% of advanced queries where the competition is broader, this time right in line with StatCounter.

Today, the latest sampling data from NetApplications shows Bing processing an estimated 5.31% of worldwide queries, although Live Search is curiously still showing up in the statistics with an extra two thirds of one percent.