Stats show that Baidu is quickly gaining users

Apr 9, 2015 14:26 GMT  ·  By

Google is undoubtedly the top search engine across the world, but the battle for the second position is much more exciting to watch, especially because it appears to involve Microsoft’s very own Bing and a surprising contestant coming from China - Baidu.

While comScore puts Bing on the second position in these charts, data provided by Net Applications claims that Microsoft’s search engine is no longer the runner-up, but only the third, after Google and Baidu.

This is a little surprising and it’s hard to say whether these figures are accurate or not, but here are the stats for the month of March 2015:

Google - 62.30% Baidu - 19.82% Bing - 8.11% Yahoo - 7.68%

Baidu is a Chinese search engine, so it’s pretty clear that most users come from its domestic market, but it’s still difficult to believe that it grew so much that it managed to overtake Bing.

Microsoft is investing millions of dollars in making Bing more effective, so this service is no longer just a search engine, but more of a stand-alone platform that powers several key products in Redmond’s portfolio. For instance, Bing is the service behind personal assistant Cortana and is also powering Apple’s Siri, while also offering search capabilities in Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone.

In the end, it’s interesting to see a Chinese search engine have more than double the share of Bing, but to make sure that this data is correct, we’ve reached out to Microsoft for an official statement.