August 2009 Search Engine Market Share results show a nice 5% spike for Google due to Baidu Search engine numbers being adjusted due to detection of automated traffic. This puts Google at the highest it has been for the whole year. While other search engines such as Bing have seen only a 0.35% increase in traffic, almost all major search engines did see an increase. Baidu dropped a staggering 5.41%. (Statistics Source).

Having said this, it is important to know that Bing has shown a vast improvement in the quality of their search showing their search success rate in Canada higher than Google.

“A successful search is defined as one where the consumer leaves the search engine after performing a search.” Hitwise

What this means is that if someone is that if someone leaves the search engine by clicking on a relative result within the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) then this is considered a successful search. If however the person goes in and out of a number of pages and returns back to the search engine to find what he actually wants then this is not a successful search.

I am sure that Bing will gain even more market share in South Africa over the next couple months as the statistics are showing that more South Africans are becoming aware of Bing and using it as an alternative search platform to Google for local search results.