Over the past few months, Microsoft has been taking its online search battle with Google to the next level. Microsoft ran a TV ad campaign that compared search results from Bing against those from Google. Microsoft has also claimed that Google doesn"t care about the privacy of their users. Most recently, Microsoft launched the "Scroogled" campaign to show that search results in Google Shopping are influenced by paid ads.
It"s looking like these campaigns may have turned a few people away from Google. ComScore"s latest Internet search market share numbers for December 2012 show Google with 66.7 percent of the market, down 0.3 percent from November 2012. Meanwhile, Microsoft"s US search share is shown at 16.3 percent in December, up 0.1 percent from November 2012.
Yahoo came in third with 12.2 percent for December 2012, again up 0.1 percent from the month before. Bing is the basis for Yahoo"s search engine, which effectively means that Microsoft gained 0.2 percent of the Internet search market in December.
ComScore also said that over 17.6 billion explicit core searches were conducted in December 2012, with Google-based sites generating 11.8 billion searches and Microsoft-based sites were second with 2.9 billion searches.
Source: ComScore | Image via ComScore