San Francisco — Despite competition from Microsoft’s Bing, which may be putting its best to knock Google Search down a peg or two, but so far it has not attained much success. According to Nielsen’s December U.S. Search Rankings, released on Wednesday, Web users queried search engines more than 9.9 billion times in December. And, following up Nielsen’s search market statistics, Hitwise has also released their search metrics for December 2009. And comparatively to Nielsen’s stats, Google is also leading the pack, getting 72.5% of all searches conducted in the U.S. during the said period.
According to a Nielsen’s report, Google’s share of U.S. search queries increased again last month, while competitors Yahoo Search and Bing fell slightly.
Google retained its overwhelming dominance of the U.S. search market, handling almost 6.7 billion queries, capturing a 67.3 percent share of the month’s searches.
Yahoo attained second in Nielsen’s December search rankings. It was queried more than 1.4 billion times, tallying 14.4 percent market share. Microsoft’s Bing, which garnered 986 million queries, captured 9.9 percent market share, according to Nielsen. Ask.com, My Web search, and Comcast search followed, with 1.7 percent, 1.0 percent, and 0.5 percent market share, respectively.
Google’s vantage over the competition grew in December from November. The company’s November market share was 65.4 percent, while Yahoo’s search share in November was 15.3 percent. It is also worth noting that Bing dropped significantly in December from its 10.7 percent market share in November.
Additionally, the Hitwise stats also indicated that Google has been driving more traffic to key U.S. industries while Bing’s figures showed the biggest leap in terms of driving traffic to these key industry categories. Specifically Google has been sending the most traffic to Automotive, Shopping and Travel Categories. While Bing is good at sending traffic to all four categories and Yahoo in the Shopping category.
Bing, unveiled last June, recorded strong gains in the search market — in the U.S. and globally — early on. But Bing’s forcefulness started to stumble a bit in September when it saw its first slip in market share.
Microsoft and Yahoo in July announced plans to join forces in a search and online advertising deal to better take on Google.