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Bing Now Powers Over 30% Of U.S. Searches

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/11/hitwise-bing-now-powers-over-30-of-u-s-searches/

Just a day after it announced its well-received updates to its search result pages, here is some more good news for Bing: according to the latest data from Experian Hitwise, Bing-powered searches — that is searches on Bing.com and search.yahoo.com — now account for 30.01% of all U.S. searches. By itself, Bing grew 16% year-over-year and 5% month-over-month and now accounted for 14.32% of all U.S. searches in April 2012. Yahoo grew somewhat slower, but still at a respectable 5% month-over-month and 7% year-over-year.

Things didn’t quite look so rosy for Google, though. Searches on Google.com, according to Hitwise, declined 3% in April 2011 compared to the previous month and were down 5% year-over-year. Google, of course, still remains far ahead of its competition. In April, almost 64.5% of all U.S. searches were powered by Google.

The 65 smaller search engines Hitwise also tracks only accounted for 6.51% of U.S. searches, by the way.

While Bing is still losing money – and while there have been some rumors about Microsoft trying to sell its search engine to Facebook – there can be little doubt that Microsoft’s persistence is slowly paying off and eating into Google’s still sizable lead. Leaving out the searches it powers on Yahoo, Bing itself, of course, still remains a niche player at under 15%, but crossing the 30% barrier is quite an achievement for Bing.

When news spread Saturday night of Whitney Houston‘s passing, it was the AP who had the first official statement from Houston’s publicist confirming the singer’s death.

But an entire hour before that, Twitter user Brittany J. Pullard (aka @BarBeeBrit) was the first person to tweet the news, according to the below graph posted by Twitter, courtesy of @isaach.

@BarBeeBritt, who resides in Los Angeles and enjoys the Hollywood club scene, as evident by her Twitter feed, tweeted at 4:02pm PST to her then-799 followers:

The tweet only received three retweets and @BarBreeBritt never revealed how exactly she heard the news, but Twitter user @AjaDiorNavy quickly had specific details of Houston’s passing at 4:15pm PST that weren’t released to the public until nearly 24 hours after the initial incident.

Once the AP tweeted the official statement from Houston’s publicist at 4:57pm PST, rapper Lil Wayne quickly expressed his condolences and received 29,000 retweets, according to Mediabistro.

Other celebrities voiced their sympathies as well, but after Lil Wayne, the top tweets went to:

Justin Bieber (15,000 retweets): “just heard the news. so crazy. One of the GREATEST VOICES EVER just passed. RIP Whitney Houston. My prayers go out to her friends and family.”

Nicki Minaj (9,000 retweets): “Jesus Christ, not Whitney Houston. Greatest of all time,” as well as tweeting a vintage photo of the late singer alongside Michael Jackson.

Katy Perry (8,000 retweets): “So devastating. We will always love you Whitney, R.I.P.”

As if there were any doubt, it appears Twitter truly is the fastest news source. Sorry, TMZ, solid effort.

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See Also:

• 48 Years In The Legendary Life Of Whitney Houston
• WATCH: Whitney Houston’s Final Performance
• Here’s A Breakdown Of Whitney Houston’s Finances—And How Her Estate Will Benefit Posthumously

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