Bing

The good news for Microsoft: Bing’s market share has grown by two whole percentage points over the past 10 months. The bad news: It’s been taking away users from the smaller search engines and not from Google. The latest numbers from comScore show that Bing had a market share of around 18% of all searches conducted in July, up from the 16% of searches it accounted for in September 2012. However, Google held onto its market share of 67% of all searches this past July, which means that Bing’s slight rise over the past 10 months hasn’t done anything to erode Google’s dominance of the search market. Instead, smaller search engines such as Yahoo, Ask and AOL have all seen their market shares shrink from where they were 10 months ago.

Here’s some disconcerting news for Microsoft: It may not matter how good Bing really is because most consumers will always assume it’s not as good as Google. Search Engine Land reports that a new study conducted by SurveyMonkey has found that most consumers will prefer any search results that have the Google label on top of them, even if they’re actually the search results pulled up by Bing. When given a choice between Bing search results that are labelled as Google and Google search results labeled as Bing, respondents chose the Google-labeled results by a ratio of roughly 2 to 1. When users were presented with the search results without any labels on them, Google’s lead over Bing shrinks dramatically as 57% chose Google and 43% chose Bing. The study concludes that consumers are “biased toward Google as a result of the brand,” which has been a major reason that Bing has not yet made significant inroads against it.

It seems that taking the Bing Challenge could make your computer more vulnerable to malware. PCMag reports that a new study from German independent testing lab AV-Test has found that searches conducted with Microsoft’s (MSFT) Bing search engine retrieve five times as many malicious websites as searches conducted with Google. After studying around 10 million search results from each search engine, AV-Test found that Bing retrieved 1,285 malicious links while Google retrieved just 272 malicious links. Both Google and Bing were still vastly safer than Russian search engine Yandex, which returned a total of 3,300 malicious links out of 13 million search results studied.