Search results on Bing are about to become more socially influenced.  The struggle to maintain search share in the US and globally, against a rival the size of Google certainly keeps the MSN search engine on its toes.  Leveraging its partnership with Facebook gives Bing a leg up in many ways, and starting early this week, Bing searchers will begin seeing results which are influenced to some degree by what their Facebook friends “like” or “share”.

In a Bing Community blog post Monday, Yusuf Mehdi, Corporate VP at Microsoft commented that “today, search remains largely driven by facts and links…Research tells us that 90% of people seek advice from family and friends as part of the decision making process. This ‘Friend Effect’ is apparent in most of our decisions…”, but “…historically, search hasn’t incorporated this ‘Friend Effect’.”  Looking to change this apparent flaw in search results, Bing will begin “including personalized search results based on the opinions of friends”, simply by having users first sign into their Facebook accounts.  Tapping into the larger, “Collective IQ” will also help shape search results when “friends don’t have the right expertise or you’re not sure what you’re looking for. Search is better when it’s not just based in math and algorithms, but also infused with the opinions of people.”

comScore recently released its overview of February US search engine share of searches.  Google Sites led the U.S. explicit core search market in February with 65.4 percent market share, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 16.1 percent and Microsoft sites with 13.6 percent (up 0.5 percentage points). Ask Network accounted for 3.2 percent of explicit core searches.

ComScore recently released its monthly analysis of the U.S. search marketplace.

Google Sites led the U.S. explicit core search market in January with 65.6 percent market share, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 16.1 percent and Microsoft Sites with 13.1 percent (up 1.1 percentage points). Ask Network accounted for 3.4 percent of explicit core searches.

ComScore released its December installment of the US search engine market share report, with Google Sites leading the U.S. explicit core search market with 66.6 percent market share (up 0.4 percentage points), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 16.0 percent and Microsoft sites with 12.0 percent (up 0.2 percentage points). Ask Network accounted for 3.5 percent of explicit core searches.

Google and Microsoft sites noticed a slight bump over November in their share of US searches, while Yahoo seems to have absorbed these respective increases, by dipping .4% compared to last month.

ComScore recently released the latest US search engine statistics for the month of November.  “Google Sites led the U.S. explicit* core search market with 66.2 percent market share, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 16.4 percent and Microsoft sites with 11.8 percent (up 0.3 percentage points). Ask Network accounted for 3.6 percent of explicit core searches.”

*Explicit searches refer to searches conducted by users who explicitly intend to interact with their search results, as opposed to contextually driven searches.

Experian^® Hitwise^® announced recently that Google accounted for 72.15% of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending Oct. 2, 2010. Bing powered search received 23.64% of searches for the month with Yahoo! Search and Bing receiving 13.54% and 10.10%, respectively. The remaining 65 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis report accounted for 4.22% of U.S. searches.

Read more…

During the WWDC’s keynote yesterday, Steve Jobs announced that the Bing search engine will be included as one of the search options (along with Google) within the Safari 5 browser.  This is big news for the number three search engine (after Google and Yahoo) and could be perceived as Apple forging closer ties with Microsoft or a gradually diminishing relationship with Google.  Either way the Bing mobile product was commended yesterday by Jobs, who said, “Microsoft has done a really nice job on this, it’s an HTML5 presentation, it’s great.”

Read more…

The Guardian.uk.co yesterday reported that Microsoft soon plans to unveil its multimillion-pound advertising attack on rival Google in the United Kingdom.

The three TV ads, similar to those which ran in the US last year and created by agency JWT, are set to launch Wednesday, 3/10, and run intermittently for three months under the same tag-name “Bing and Decide”.  TV ads will be supported by digital advertising across the Microsoft network as well as social media outlets and other web properties.

Microsoft’s efforts intend to bite into Google’s near 90% share of search market traffic.

Read more…