Reston, VA — After Yahoo and Microsoft finally merged their gigantic search technology and advertising partnership, comScore, Inc., the most prominent leaders in measuring the digital world, released its monthly statistics and it appears that Microsoft’s Bing search engine was once again a hit with consumers. While Google remains firmly atop the search engine heap, for the second month, but Yahoo’s explicit core search share in the U.S. had declined in December.
In a month when more consumers than normal flock online to find product information, compare prices or find gifts online, most still turned to Google. But both Yahoo and Bing search engines witnessed nice increases in use, according to comScore, Google along the search heap captured a 66% share of explicit search queries. While, Yahoo (16%) and Microsoft’s Bing (12%) rounded out the top three.
Nevertheless, Yahoo’s 16 percent share was decreased from 16.4 percent in November, which was actually down from 16.5 percent from October. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s aggressive Bing search service increased from 11.5 percent in October to 11.8 percent in November to 12 percent in December.
Researchers claim that more than 18 billion core searches were queried in December, 11 billion from Google, 3.4 billion from Yahoo and 2.1 billion from Bing. Almost 70% Google”s returns included organic search results; from Bing 24% of results were organically powered. And perhaps more important than an influx of users, the results from Bing and Yahoo seem to have been more relevant to the consumers than searches queried through Google’s search engine.