After losing a tiny bit of market share earlier this year, comScore announced today that Google is gaining again in the U.S. search market. The results are slight, only a 0.3% gain, but they have to be disappointing for Microsoft’s Bing team.
Google basically gained share back from Yahoo, which lost 0.3% from September. comScore reports Google with 65.6% of the market, Microsoft’s sites (Bing) with 14.8% (a 0.1% gain over September), and Yahoo (powered by Bing) with 15.2%. AOL and Ask are also covered in comScore’s coverage, with a mere 1.5% and 2.9% of the market, respectively.
This is based on an examination of 18 billion searches in October, which is up by 6% since September. Google pulled in about 11.9 billion, while Yahoo had about 2.7 billion, and Microsoft had about 2.68 billion. Note that all of the search properties were up in volume, since the total number of U.S. search queries was up as well.
If you compare with last year’s numbers, you’ll see that Google’s market share has moved very little. Last year, Google held 66.3% of the U.S. search market, compared to 65.6% this year. A drop, but not even a full percentage point. In terms of volume, Google has increased significantly. Last year in October Google held 11 billion, compared to 18 billion this year. The overall search volume has increased by almost 2 billion.
Microsoft has moved from 11.5% of the market to 14.8%, and Yahoo has slid from 16.5% to 15.2%. Again, they’re still up in volume. Ask and AOL have both lost year-over-year. Last year Ask had 3.6%, and AOL had 2.1%.
Of course, that’s not the entire search universe. There’s hundreds of search engines, though the bulk of them haven’t gained any traction. A number of them are also just based on existing engines or aggregating results from several engines. DuckDuckGo is my favorite of the small-time search engines. What’s yours?
