Microsoft Bing Controls 30% Of Search Market, Google Slowly Sinking

Microsoft has secured 30% of the search market, largely at Google’s expense, according to data from Experian Hitwise.

The new March numbers claim that Microsoft achieved 30.01% of the U.S. search market share in March — 14.32% from Bing.com and 15.69% from Yahoo Search, which Bing now powers. The growth was pretty evenly distributed as well: Bing.com’s search market share grew by 6% from February while Yahoo search grew by 5%.

Google, on the other hand, now controls 64.42% of the U.S. search market compared with its 66.69% share in February. What’s worse, Google’s market share is down 10% from August 2010, when it owned 71.59% of the search market. August was the first month Yahoo Search was powered by Bing, and since then, both search engines have grown. This is especially true for Bing.com, which only had 9.87% of the market in August.

One of the reasons why Yahoo and Bing may be gaining on Google is that users are apparently achieving more success out of Bing-powered search: 81.14% of Yahoo Search users and 80.32% of Bing.com users clicked on a search result and visited a website. Google, on the other hand, only achieves a 65.91% success rate, according to Experian Hitwise’s numbers.

While these are only the stats from one analysis firm, they match up with trends in comScore’s data as well. Google’s growth has flatlined while Bing has been on the rise. It’s a much different story than it was early last year, when Google was trouncing Yahoo and Bing.

Google still controls two-thirds of the market, of course. The search giant has been working on a lot of new features for its flagship product, including +1, social search, Google Instant and the ability to block unwanted website.

Twitter Search Results Now Show People Too

Twitter has just made it a lot easier to find other users with the integration of people within search results.

Twitter has had people search for years now — it’s a useful tool to find friend or brands that you might want to follow. However, it’s relatively obscure, as it has never been part of Twitter’s main search feature.

Many users have been noticing a new feature when they search for people on Twitter.com, though. Now when you perform a search that involves prominent people or brands (e.g. John Mayer or Mashable), the top three name results will appear, complete with the option to view other name results.

It isn’t perfect, though: when I performed a vanity search for my name, the second result was a fake account — while relevant, it’s definitely not me. The “Verified” checkmark eliminates confusion on some searches, however.

The feature was built by Twitter engineer Adrien Cahen and designed by Twitter Interaction Designer Nancy Broden. We have to say, we think they did a good job: it’s a simple, seamless and long-overdue integration of people search and Twitter search. Our major gripe is that it’s still not available on search.twitter.com yet. Hopefully that will change very soon.