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Since the launch of Bing, watching the developments in the search engine market is finally interesting again. According to the latest data from Compete for July, Bing continues to grow slowly but surely. At the same time, though, Compete notes that Bing has not been able to convert its growing search share into a rise in paid clicks on ads on the site. In July, Bing’s sponsored click rate fell slightly to 5.5%, even though in June, it still saw an impressive growth in paid clicks.

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As for the other search engines, Google continues to hold steady at around 73.75% market share (down from 73.90% last month), though Yahoo lost a full percentage point and is now at 15.6% after seeing its search volume drop 3.3% compared to last month. In total, Compete estimates that a total of 12.5 billion queries were served by all the major search engines combined in July.

Interestingly enough, Ask, a search engine few of us think about anymore, continues to grow rapidly. Compared to last month, the number of searches on Ask grew almost 48%, though the company still holds only about 3% of the search engine market.

All eyes are obviously on how the partnership between Bing and Yahoo will work out. Chances are that Bing will continue to grow over the next few months, but, as Compete’s Marko Madjarac points out, Yahoo “will need to bring high-quality advertisers whose sponsored search results generate more paid clicks.” While Microsoft’s data shows that users are quite happy with Bing, we will also have to wait and see what happens once Microsoft slows down its $100 million marketing campaign for Bing.

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