The power of bundled software can be an amazing thing – all three major operating systems have a bundled Internet browser, each of which has 73% of their OS’s Internet usage (based on a sample of 163 million US/Canada impressions across the Chitika network in early August). But Bing, the decision engine Microsoft bundles with Internet Explorer, only gets 10.3% of IE users’ searches.
Microsoft has long been known as the king of bundling, with the assumption that bundling creates market share. But now, it seems that crown has moved to Google, the default search engine – and 89.57% of the search market – in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome.
And while Bing has received quite a bit of good reviews, publicity, and advertising, it is still struggling, even with Microsoft Internet Explorer users, falling in at third place on the search rankings behind Google and Yahoo!
Microsoft has a lot of work to do in order to take any significant market share away from Google, but if they use their experience in bundling software, it appears that the opportunity is there to jump up to a majority of users.
The Raw Numbers:
| Windows | Yahoo | Bing | AOL | Total Search | % | |
| IE | 76,712,986 | 12,168,239 | 10,686,158 | 2,040,240 | 103,392,630 | 72.37% |
| Chrome | 4,332,212 | 10,090 | 78,240 | 4,585 | 4,451,939 | 3.12% |
| Firefox | 29,731,411 | 2,530,000 | 651,709 | 158,157 | 33,451,586 | 23.41% |
| Safari | 768,341 | 70,801 | 11,049 | 1,207 | 857,436 | 0.60% |
| Other | 654,419 | 34,471 | 9,395 | 1,303 | 711,756 | 0.50% |
| Total | 112,199,369 | 14,813,601 | 11,436,551 | 2,205,492 | 142,865,347 | 100.00% |
| % | 78.54% | 10.37% | 8.01% | 1.54% | 100.00% |
| Linux | Yahoo | Bing | AOL | Total Search | % | |
| IE | 677 | 56 | 3 | 0 | 746 | 0.06% |
| Chrome | 10,909 | 2 | 53 | 0 | 10,980 | 0.94% |
| Firefox | 812,169 | 34,712 | 7,765 | 696 | 861,840 | 73.43% |
| Safari | 198,586 | 3,495 | 451 | 67 | 203,994 | 17.38% |
| Other | 88,193 | 2,565 | 772 | 28 | 96,201 | 8.20% |
| Total | 1,110,534 | 40,830 | 9,044 | 791 | 1,173,761 | 100.00% |
| % | 94.61% | 3.48% | 0.77% | 0.07% | 100.00% |
| Mac | Yahoo | Bing | AOL | Total Search | % | |
| IE | 2,723 | 191 | 272 | 15 | 3,246 | 0.02% |
| Chrome | 4,074 | 4 | 37 | 0 | 4,129 | 0.02% |
| Firefox | 4,630,253 | 175,240 | 52,938 | 5,746 | 4,901,368 | 26.89% |
| Safari | 12,252,530 | 725,474 | 152,603 | 29,885 | 13,249,869 | 72.69% |
| Other | 62,850 | 2,798 | 534 | 2,427 | 69,887 | 0.38% |
| Total | 16,952,430 | 903,707 | 206,384 | 38,073 | 18,228,499 | 100.00% |
| % | 93.00% | 4.96% | 1.13% | 0.21% | 100.00% |
*The percentages of search don’t add up to 100% because of a small number of Ask.com searches which weren’t included in this table.