Bing Falls In The Rankings, Is Replaced By Russian Search Engine

It's an embarrassing day for Bing, with the search engine officially falling in ranking under the apparently not-completely-obscure Russian search engine Yandex, which now holds steady as the fourth largest search engine in the world. This information comes from a ComScore report that shows Yandex as hitting a higher number of users per month in both November and December 2012 than Microsoft's offering.

Not surprisingly, Google came in at number one with a total of 114.7 billion searches, totaling a whopping 65.2-percent of the market share. Baidu, a Chinese search engine, held steady in second place with 8.2-percent of the market share and 14.5 billion searches. Yahoo! came in at a modest third place with 4.9-percent market share and 8.6 billion.

Then, in a surprising turn of events, Russia's Yandex came in number four, with 2.8-percent of the market share and 4.8 billion searches. This nudged Bing out of its fourth-place slot by a relatively small amount. Microsoft's search engine is ranked at 2.5-percent of the market share with 4.4 billion searches.

Although Yandex is not a common name in much of the world, it is a popular search engine in Russian-speaking locations, responsible for over 60-percent of searches performed in Russia. Its ranking is likely established for the same reason Baidu's is – the large population to which it caters. The thing to keep in mind, however, is that while Microsoft's search engine score is determined by multiple services/properties, Yandex is just Yandex – a Russian search engine that stands on its own, with no outlier software, that still beat Bing.

[via Search Engine Watch]