Is the honeymoon period over for Bing?

Statcounter have recently released results that show search engine Bing has recorded the first decline in traffic since launch.The rival search engine to Google was beginning to take a healthy percentage of the search market.

Bing’s share of the US market fell from 9.64% to 8.51%. Consequently, Google’s share increased from 77.83% in August, to 80.08% in September. This trend is hardly surprising, as it’s likely many users tried out Bing for the attraction of a new search provider, before returning to the trusted Google.

The declining share of the market for Bing also comes at the same time that their search results have been integrated with Facebook, which shows that the experiment has had negligible effect. It also coincides with Google adding increased functionality to their search results, which will inevitably steal traffic from rivals Yahoo and Bing.

It’s still early days for Bing and the decline in traffic is no reason to write it off yet. The best opportunity for Bing is to try and be a whole new search experience, not just the new Google. Steps such as adding their results to Facebook are the right way to go about doing this, but it may just take more time to settle in. It would also be interesting to see the average age of the user on Google, compared to Bing. It may be the case that Bing will become the choice of search for the younger generation as they seek a ‘cool’ new brand.