Bing appears to be winning the search engine battle, why?

Is Google’s 13 years of dominance about to come to an end as we switch to the cool new Bing?

It may have only been launched in June this year, but already Microsoft’s “decision engine” Bing has already increased its usage by 7%. Google however, has seen the number of searches conducted slip by 1% – could this signal the beginning of the end of Google monopoly?

According to new research from Hitwise, Google accounted for 70.6% of all US searches in October.

Yahoo! Search, Bing and Ask.com received 16.14%, 9.57% and 2.62%, respectively.

The launch of Google’s first global advertising push, which will include the UK, France, Canada, Japan, Australia, and Singapore, came as a surprise considering the search engine king built its entire empire without a single advert, relying only on word-of-mouth.

Google is feeling the heat from rising competitors for the first time with Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing sparing nothing in their assault on its market share.

Microsoft is next year launching its first true web version of Office that will complement its traditional Office apps. Google, with its global campaign, is attempting to steal a march on the competition before it even launches, which is smart. But will businesses ever see Google as a serious competitor and software solutions provider looking beyond its search engine capabilities?

Microsoft isn’t doing this all alone, remember. It partnered up with ailing search engine Yahoo just a few months back and although the deal is currently awaiting approval over competition concerns from the US Justice Department, it already has the backing of advertising heavyweights including WPP, Publicis Groupe and Omnicom.

Google has also been slow to make as big as an impact as it was hoping for with its browser Google Chrome. It holds just a 2.59 per cent share, well behind Microsoft’s Internet Explorer which has 67.7 per cent of the market share.

While this may be the first global campaign from Google, it certainly can’t be the last.

Google has not only lost its stranglehold in western nations, but also in emerging markets such as China. In fact, China’s Baidu now holds the title of ‘the world’s largest search engine’ (given China’s 1.3 billion strong population) despite Google’s presence there. Google’s struggle to crack China is just one of the giant’s many anxieties over the past few years.

Google has always maintained that it isn’t worried about competition, but perhaps this is starting to change. Tell us what you think below.