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Microsoft’s latest search engine Bing may be rapidly accumulating search engine market share, but like many of its competitors there’s no sign of it cracking Korea.
According to net data research firm Metrix, Bing enjoyed some 900,000 visitors in Korea during its first week, before growing an extra 40 per cent the next.
This put Bing’s search engine market share at 1 per cent; a figure far more impressive than it sounds for a nation of internet users that almost always opt for local search engines Naver and Daum.
However, numbers began to nosedive thereafter, sitting at 750,000 visitors during Bing’s fourth week, with the most recent stats reporting a 0.15 per cent market share.
By comparison, in the US Bing had surpassed Yahoo’s popularity in less than a month.
According to regional news site JoongAng, one reason for the search engine’s notable traffic plummet is that – during mid-June – Korean Bing users were able to access adult content without needing to work through adult identification log-ins.
It is said that, during the second week of June, over 58 per cent of all search keywords were related to adult sites.
The search engine’s rapid decline in popularity suggests that this adult-site accessibility is no longer present.
Last week it was revealed that Microsoft’s Bing search engine acquired 8.23 per cent market share since its launch.
