Reston, VA -– With a lot of number crunching pertaining to earnings, revenues and search advertising have just come out for all of us to consume. comScore Inc., the leader in evaluating the digital world, last week published their June rankings for the top five search engines, with Google taking the lead at 61.8 percent of US searches.
In June 2008, Americans performed 11.5 billion “core searches” during the month, representing a 7-percent gain versus May.
Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft all witnessed month over month increase in their share of the US search market in June 2008.
June 2008 U.S. Core Search Rankings:
In June, Google Sites sustained its lead in the U.S. core search market capturing 61.5% of the searches performed, slightly less from 61.8% in May. Google was followed by Yahoo! Sites (20.9%, up from 20.6% in May), Microsoft Sites (9.2%, up from 8.5% in May), Ask Network (4.3%), and AOL LLC (4.1%).
Figures quoted are based on five major search engines including partner searches and cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in the core search numbers.
While Americans carried out 11.5 billion searches at the core search engines, representing a 7-percent increase versus May. Out of those 11.5 billion core searches in June, Google took 7 billion of them. Yahoo recorded 2.4 billion and Microsoft followed by 1 billion. Ask.com experienced a small increase to 501 million queries, but AOL fell from 486 million to 471 million queries.
Google’s reported total income for Q2 was at $5.37 billion. And as expected with the downtrend, Google’s stocks went low to as much as 12% after the announcement.
Hence, search share is important to the companies’ business because it conveys there is still a possibility of larger inventory of search results against which advertisements can be sold.
The fact is, regardless of the economic recession, search engine advertising is still a viable business, and continues to be Google’s formula for success. And that is why competitors would do anything to shake off Google from its current position, no matter what it takes.