New York — comScore, Inc., a leader in assessing the digital world, last week released its monthly qSearch analysis of the U.S. search marketplace. Regardless of whether a user is searching for jobs or video clips of Britney Spears, Americans carried out 13.5 billion online searches at the core search engines, and backing up the argument that online marketers should use more than one search engine, the number of searches by U.S. consumers on Yahoo rose 10% in January over the prior month, while market leader Google’s total rose 5%, according to comScore reports.
January 2009 U.S. Core Search Rankings
About 63 percent of January searches were conducted through Google-owned sites, followed by Yahoo Sites, which accumulated its market share slightly to 21% in January from 20.5% in December among what comScore views as the five core search engines: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL and Ask Network.
Following are the five core search engines with their number of January searches in millions, change from December, and market share among the core engines*:
Google Sites, 8,497, 6%, 63%
Yahoo Sites, 2,836, 9%, 21%
Microsoft Sites, 1,136, 8%, 8.5%
AOL LLC, 520, 9%, 3.9%
Ask Network, 497, 2%, 3.7%
Microsoft Sites received 8.5 percent, AOL LLC collected 3.9 percent and Ask Network garnered 3.7 percent. Though Google’s core search share among these engines dropped slightly from 63.5 to 63 percent, overall Google sites — including YouTube — attracted 11.7 billion searches, up 5 percent from December. Yahoo witnessed a 10 percent increase with 2.9 billion searches, and Microsoft inched up about 9 percent with 1.2 billion.
* Figures based on the five major search engines including partner searches and cross-channel searches.
Americans conducted a total of 19.98 billion Internet searches among engines comScore tracked in January, up 7% from 18.69 billion in December, according to comScore. Google Sites handled 8.5 billion core searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.8 billion and Microsoft Sites with 1.1 billion. Overall, the five core search engines accounted for more than two-thirds, or 13.5 billion, of the January searches, up from 12.7 billion in December.
Though holiday sales gave a boost to Amazon’s earnings, its search engine did not performed as well, dropping 4 percent to 196 million searches.
Craigslist withessed a 28 percent rise with 497 million searches, while eBay jumped upto 8 percent with 541 million, and Facebook climbed 21 percent with 195 million respectively.
comScore listed eBay, Amazon, Craigslist and Facebook, even though they only offer Internet search within their own sites, but because they do support search activity that can be monetized through the sale of products found on these sites, comScore senior analyst Andrew Lipsman says.