The global search engine scene has always been very competitive. This is so because advertising through search engine, pioneered by Google, has become a very huge source of revenue for companies involved in the business of search like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! etc. Therefore, the competing teams behind the major search engines in the market are constantly trying their best so that they can outsmart their counterparts and achieve a higher percentage of the global market share.

Google is still at the top of the pecking order with a little more than three-fourth of the market share. Yahoo! has still maintained its second place with 11.75% of the market share. But the most noticeable point is that Microsoft’s Bing has risen to the third spot with a market share of 10%.

This shows us that the hotly contested search market is going through change due to a major shakeout. With its recent self re-invention, Microsoft has found itself again a major player in the market. Bing remains the smallest of the big three, but with its lightning fast product cycle, and friendly interface, not to mention strong search results; it seems only a short time until it finds a comfortable role as the second largest.

Bing’s momentum appears to be building both in terms of traffic and public acceptance. That is in part due to clever implementations of visual search and other shortcut tricks that make it more likely a search query will return exactly the factual information one is requesting. While Google may still dominate the sector, even if Bing becomes a strong second player in the space, that could mean a huge revenue boost for Microsoft.

The growing success of Bing asks the question – why is Yahoo losing share? The company will actually shut down its search algorithms sometime next year in favor of using the algorithms designed by Microsoft that power Bing. The most obvious reason for its declining share is that Bing is eating its lunch, a situation that Yahoo probably hoped would not occur when she signed the search engine licensing and advertising revenue sharing deal with Microsoft last summer. Bing has been making strong gains in the lucrative shopping vertical, a search space where Yahoo has long been the largest player.

For Yahoo, the risk of a total collapse in search is something the company has yet to contemplate but could possibly become a reality if Bing picks up considerable steam and Yahoo ends up trapped in a contract that hems in its ability to innovate in the search space. Apart from the big three, two other prominent but less popular search engines, Cuil and Ask are determined to fight harder and carry their search engine to the top.