Google, Market Share | featured news

Read 'Android conquers marketshare, Apple conquers profits: Who's winning?' on Digital Trends. As Android entrenches itself as the leading smartphone platform in terms of sales, most of the smartphone money seems to be going to Apple. What matters more: money or marketshare?

Slowly but steadily, Microsoft Bing has become a potent threat to Google in the search market. Over the last few months, Microsoft’s aggressive strategy with Bing has started to yield market share gains over competitors Google, Yahoo and AOL in the U.S. search market. Bing’s market share, which was around 11% in September 2010, is now close to 14% as of February 2011.

After months of slow but steady increases in its market share, Bing's share of the search market in the US and globally fell for the first time in September.

A week and a half ago, we highlighted numbers from StatCounter that demonstrated that Google was losing market share to Bing. This made sense: Bing is a new search engine with heavy marketing and compelling features.

Bing's share of the search market grew another percentage point in July, indicating that some of those initial users may be sticking around for the long haul.

Microsoft is definitely relishing its Bing moment, communicating gains in market share every chance it gets to build a story of steady progression against both Google and Yahoo.

The new browser wars on on. More than a decade after Microsoft killed off Netscape with Internet Explorer, competition in the browser market has never been stronger. Just last week, Mozilla released Firefox 3.5, which has now been downloaded nearly 14 million times.

Last month we reported a potentially important change in search-market share trends: After years of steady decline, Yahoo's domestic share numbers (YHOO) had increased for five months in a row. Well, the good news continued in January, with Yahoo's share jumping a half-point to 21%, per Comscore.