San Francisco — In a closely watched monthly ranking of search engine providers, indicates that October witnessed business as usual in the U.S. search engine market with Google and Bing both seizing slightly more share, but Yahoo, which partners with Microsoft on some technology, slipped a bit, according to data released yesterday by digital measuring market research firm comS core.
Google continue to dominate search last month, capturing 66.3 percent of explicit core searches and 64.3 percent of total core searches, which includes Google Instant. For search marketers, this means paid campaigns and content strategies should cater to the search giant. While Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing straggled behind, with market share in the teens, though Bing did see a slightly uptick, according to data from comScore.
(Credit: ComScore)
comScore noted that the search results symbolizes the second month that Google’s new Instant Search features have been incorporated in comScore’s rankings.
The research firm said last month that when people type something into Google, hit “enter,” and then click on a link, it counts that activity in its “explicit core search” results. Results that show up in Google Instant as someone types will be included in “total core search” results if a user pauses on that for at least three seconds, comScore said.
Google moved ahead 0.2 percentage points, to a 66.3% market share, while Microsoft rose 0.3%, to 11.5% for the month. Yahoo dropped 0.2%, to a 16.5% market share. The remaining two search engines in the rankings also dropped — 0.1% for Ask Network, to 3.6%, and AOL LLC Network fell 0.2%, to 2.1%. Ask’s results include the company’s new question-and-answer approach to search.
Eyeing the actual numbers, the U.S. search market saw 16.6 billion core searches overall in October, with Google capturing 11 billion searches, followed by Yahoo with 2.7 billion, and Microsoft with 1.9 billion. Ask.com — which recently moved its focus away from core search — had 598 million searches, followed by AOL with 346 million.