Who Uses Google, Yahoo! and Bing?

The Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance has begun to pick up steam for real, and naturally, search marketers have many questions.  They’re concerned about changes to the practical day-to-day aspects of bid management, and they’re curious about how (and how significantly) performance will be impacted once Bing’s results are fully integrated into Yahoo! over the next two months.

Before any impact can be assessed, however, it’s good to know where we’re starting from, so let’s take a moment to assess the status quo.  Just who are marketers already reaching via the three big search engines?  Is the Bing searcher the same as the Yahoo! searcher, and the same as the Google searcher too?  Not exactly.  comScore data for July reveals some notable demographic differences in age, income and household size.

Bing Skews Older, Fits Well With Yahoo!

While Bing has made modest gains against Google in the overall share of searches since its launch, it isn’t capturing as many younger searchers.  One-quarter of Bing’s searchers (26%) are under age 24, while the comparable share for Google is one-third.  The good news for the integration of Yahoo! and Bing is that the two have very similar age demographics overall, with most segments within one percentage point of each other.  Of the three engines, Bing has the absolute largest share of the 45-54, 55-64, and 65+ age brackets.  So while Bing is no doubt serious about taking search share from Google in the long run, it probably won’t be able to do so without a concerted effort to grab more of the younger segments.

High-Income Searchers (Slightly) Prefer Google

Household income demographics for the three search engines vary less widely than age demographics, and moreover, income data hews closely to the distribution for the entire Internet.  That said, Google does have a slightly larger share of the highest-income searchers ($100,000+).  Bing has a slight advantage among middle-income searchers, while Yahoo! has greater share than its competitors in the lower income brackets (under $40,000).

Yahoo! Has More Singles, Google Has More 3+ Households 

Household sizes for users of the three search engines largely mirror those of the entire Internet user base.  Yahoo! has a slightly larger share of single-person households, while Google has a slightly larger share of 3+ person households, presumably families with children.  (Presence of children data, not shown here, indicate that all three engines have a similar share of these households, at 55-58%, which again closely mirrors the average Internet user’s household.)