Despite Being the Default, IE Users Still Prefer Google to Bing

The search market is dominated by Google, there's no debate about that. But actually measuring that dominance is harder than it may seem. Chitika opted for an interesting method, afforded by the fact that it serves hundreds of millions of ads across search engines.

In a recent report, it pitted search engines against each other based on the browser used. While there were no big surprises, there were some interesting results.

In IE for example, Google still clearly leads the way. But it only managed a 53.1 percent market share. Meanwhile, Bing had 22.5 percent and Yahoo a respectable 19.1 percent.

Bing, of course, is the default search engine on Internet Explorer. This should make it pretty clear why Google paid $1 billion to be the default browser in Firefox for three more years.

Google manages a more comfortable lead in other browsers. Opera users are Google fans in particular, 95.3 percent of them reply on it compared to just the 3.2 percent that use Yahoo and the 1.1 percent that use Bing.

The numbers aren't so skewed towards Google even in its own browser, Chrome. Here, Google manages a still impressive 90.5 percent market share, followed by Yahoo with five percent and Bing with 2.7 percent.

Things look the same in Firefox, though Google only manages a 78.5 percent market share, despite being the default. Yahoo gets a respectable 13.2 percent. Yahoo is still is the default search engine in some countries, where Yahoo leads overall as well, but the study only looks at US and Canadian traffic. Bing is used by 5.3 percent of Firefoxers.

Google does well in Safari too, it grabs an 85.5 percent market share, compared to 9.6 percent for Yahoo and 2.9 percent for Bing.


Via: Despite Being the Default, IE Users Still Prefer Google to Bing