Just caught a tweet by Robert Scoble saying that Firefox is going to announce a deal with Microsoft to use Bing as the deafault search engine instead of Google. I will be interested to see the Silicon Valley Echo chamber firestorm on this one.
So let say this does get announced tomorrow. Scoble is a smart guy and is well connected so I believe it. This means the amongst the Four browsers that matter (do you like me more now Apple?) This is how everything shakes out using stats from Clicky so I would guess accurate
IE – 50% market share, Bing search engine
Firefox – 30% market share, Bing Search engine
Google Chrome – 12% market share, Google search engine
Safari (all apple stuff) – 8% market share, Google Search engine
This seems to mean that Bing should own the market but as we know quite often people will go to Google the website apparently as the Bing search engine is still far behind with Comscore last month saying that Google still has 61% of the market with Bing/Yahoo (remember they are both using Bing search now) well behind with 32% of the market.
Google has reason to be a bit worried with that 30% gimme marketshare from Firefox going from Google to partially Bing but remember that most of the people that use Firefix are advanced users who will not bother with default search and likely use the Google toolbar complete with all it’s additional features.
Search is important to both Microsoft and Google still and Microsoft although more aggresive lately still have a terrible toolbar and not nearly the market recognition that Google has.
What do you think the next year has in store? I have not even looked lately at the results of Bing, I am so used to Google as are most others that I have not bothered to see what the quality of Bing search results are.
