Yandex surpasses Bing as 4th largest search engine

Search Engine Watch reports Yandex has surpassed Microsoft's Bing to become the 4th largest search engine. According to a comScore qSearch report, Yandex processed 4.844 billion queries in December 2012, whereas Microsoft sites did just 4.477 billion.

Google is by far the largest search site with 114.73 billion search queries, representing a marketshare of 65.2 percent, while Chinese search firm Baidu follows at a distant second place with 14.5 billion (8.2 percent). Yahoo ranks third with 8.63 billion (4.9 percent), but considering that Yahoo now uses Bing's search data the numbers look a little bit more rosy for Microsoft if you add Yahoo's search figures to those of Bing.

As you can see in the graph (Google purposely removed for context), Yandex began passing Microsoft in November, but the difference was tiny and initially it could have perceived looking like a statistical error.

There are only two out of Top-5 search entities which grew higher last year: Baidu (13 percent) and Yandex (27.8 percent) while the total number of search queries worldwide decreased by 4.6 percent since December 2011.

Exploring this deeper, reveals a few interesting data points. The audience growth continues to evolve and grow in Russia, however, global growth in Western markets where Microsoft has most of their share has slowed down.