Russian Search Engine Beats Bing for Market Share

According to the market researchers at comScore, Russian search engine Yandex is now the fourth most popular search engine in the world, knocking Microsoft’s Bing down to fifth place. Meanwhile, there are no surprises at the top of the chart—Google continues to lead the global search race with more than 65 percent of the market.

GigaOm’s David Meyer first reported the news, writing, “Russia’s answer to Google may have a way to go if it wants to catch up with the search leader, but it’s just inched up into fourth place, knocking Microsoft and Bing down to fifth…. That actually first showed up in November’s stats, when Yandex processed 4.62 billion search requests to Microsoft’s 4.48 billion requests, but that meant each had roughly 2.6 percent share, and with such things you want to see a continuing trend. Sure enough, in December 2012 Yandex handled 4.84 billion requests (2.8 percent share) and Microsoft 4.48 billion (2.5 percent share). It’s a trend.”

SearchEngineLand’s Danny Sullivan noted, “Most attention has been focused on Yandex passing Microsoft to take over the fourth place spot as the world’s most popular search engine, based on searches conducted. That’s true, though when you look at unique searchers — the number of people who use the search engine, rather than the number of searches conducted — Microsoft still has a big lead over Yandex.”

East-West Digital News quoted Yandex spokesperson Tatiana Komarova, who said, “It’s thanks to the Russian audience that the number of Yandex searches grew. Internet penetration is still relatively low in Russia and it continues to grow by adding older people and residents of small towns.”

Michael Bonfils with Search Engine Watch added, “As you’d expect, Google still reigned supreme with 114.73 billion search queries and a 65.2 percent market share. China search giant Baidu was second globally with 14.5 billion (8.2 percent), and Yahoo came in third with 8.63 billion (4.9 percent).”