Reston, VA — According to analytics firm comScore, which has just released its latest U.S. search engine rankings figures, and it probably is not going to surprise you at all to hear that, for the month of September, Google remained the reigning king, while things are not looking too good for Yahoo.
According to new figures released by digital analytics company comScore today, Google actually enjoyed a 0.3 percentage increase from August to September, climbing from 66.4% explicit search share to 66.7%. Trailing behind were Microsoft’s search engines, which remained steady at 15.9 percent of the market share, but Yahoo’s Bing-powered search lost another 0.6 percentage points and now has just 12.2 percent of the market. That is down from 12.8 percent in August and 13 percent in July and June.
(Credit: comScore)
Among the networks that apparently benefited from Yahoo’s decline are AOL, which is teetering on the brink when it comes to search market share, enjoyed the tiniest of gains too, rising one-tenth of a percentage point to 1.8%, including Ask, which was up 0.3% itself, from 3.5% share to 3.8%.
Whereas, Microsoft’s Bing, which is Google’s largest competitor, fared stably between August and September 15.9%, so while it has not gain, its certainly better than a loss. In total, comScore reports, Bing powered just over a quarter (25.1 percent) of all U.S. searches in September.
Sadly though, since the last year, Yahoo’s share has been in a steady free-fall. It finally lost its second place spot to Microsoft’s Bing last December. Just a year and a half ago, Yahoo’s search market share was 16 percent, by January it was 14, and now it is down to 12.
Although it is not the biggest loss — at least not by a longshot — but the struggling Yahoo needs all the help it can get in the search department. comScore states that right around 16.3 billion searches were made in September, which is down about 4% from August’s 17.04 billion. Almost all of the search engines that were tracked in comScore’s report suffered a decline as a result of that drop — with Yahoo in particular getting hit the hardest — but interestingly, Ask was the only one to make gains in explicit search queries, gaining 3% over August’s results.
While those figures appear high, it is actually down slightly from August, when people searched more than 17 billion times. Of these searches, 10.9 billion were done on Google, and 2.6 billion were on Microsoft sites.
On the other hand, the searches summed in this statistics are from home and work computers, not mobile devices. Other research out today from the Macquarie Group shows that desktop Web search declined in September for the first time since it began tracking this data in 2006. Macquarie analysts said in their report that the increasing number of mobile searches appears to be the biggest reason for the decline.
Nevertheless, even though Ask is a long way away from being able to challenge Google for search share (or Bing for that matter), September was a pretty good month for it. Anyways, comScore’s report indicates that Google does not have to worry about having its title taken away any time soon, though the fact that Bing is holding steady while Yahoo is losing a small amount of market share has to be encouraging for Microsoft.