Something which caught us by surprise recently were new statistics from advertising network, Chitika. They reveal that Bing has taken second place in search market share from Yahoo and claim it has been this way for a couple of months now.

Although most of the other leading analytics companies (including StatCounter) still show Yahoo leading Bing, Chitika’s statistics show that Bing is ahead of Yahoo! by 4.5%.

The stats show that Google remains unquestionably in the number one position by driving 80.97% of search-related traffic to sites in Chitika network. Meanwhile, Bing jumped into the number 2 spot with 10.6% marketing share and pushing Yahoo! down to third position with 6.14%. AOL and Aim make the remaining positions in the top five with 1.22% and 1.12% of the search market, respectively.

Here are the official statistics from Chitika:

Our question is: why is Chitika showing different results?
The fundamental difference between Chitika’s numbers and other rating services, such as comScore & Hitwise, is in the type and source of data they collect.

Chitika collates its data from the search traffic coming into its own advertising network. On the other hand, comScore and other rating services, measure search traffic data from the search engines themselves. The traffic being measured is both paid and unpaid. So if some sites in the Chitika network are doing major advertising on Bing and not Yahoo that could potentially skew the results, however it is hard to believe that it’s a major contributing factor for the shuffle in Bing’s position.

One thing that will be interesting to watch is the impact on Yahoo! & Bing’s market share when their partnership is fully implemented. We will all have to keep an eye out for those stats!

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