San Francisco — After slipping to a two-year low in August, global search engine behemoth Google’s U.S. market search share climbs back to 65.3% in September, up from 64.8 percent in August, while Yahoo! Inc. plunged to its lowest search share ever at 15.5 percent, according to comScore Inc.
In August, Google had dropped to 64.8%, which was the first time in two years the search engine had plunged below 65% of the market. However, Google improved back above that benchmark in September, grabbing 65.3% of U.S. searches, according to a report out today from comScore, an Internet tracking company.
Yahoo retained its No. 2 position, even as its market share fairly plummeted to 15.5% from 16.3% for the month, during which former CEO Carol Bartz was ousted from the struggling Internet company, Reston, Virginia-based comScore said today.
Bartz was sacked after failing to transform the company around following 30 months on the job. Yahoo CFO Tim Morse is the interim CEO for Yahoo, which is reportedly being shopped around after failing to revitalize itself in the face of Google, Facebook and other rivals for consumers’ attention.
However, Microsoft’s Bing, which supports Yahoo’s search on the back end, was unchanged at 14.7% share, failing to move the needle forward. Meanwhile, comScore said explicit core searches were up 8.6% for the third quarter, led by Google’s core growth of 7.4% for Q3.
Google, which garners most of its revenue from search advertising, has recently unleashed a slew of new features to help it stay ahead of rivals. In June, the company unveiled Instant Pages, providing quicker connections to links in query results. The change is designed to cut 2 to 5 seconds from the process.
Jefferies & Co analyst Youssef Squali commented that comScore does not count mobile searches conducted on Android handsets and other platforms, and video searches for YouTube, the world’s leading video publisher.
“All of these are becoming an intensifying part of Google’s overall traffic, growing materially faster than U.S. desktop search,” Squali stated.
“By some estimates, 10 to 15% of all search queries are done on mobile, and Google has 90% of the mobile search market. International, mobile and YouTube are what explains the historical disparity between comScore’s reported growth for Google’s paid clicks and the company’s higher reported numbers.”
Nevertheless, Microsoft and Yahoo have struggled to crumble Google’s leadership, even after joining forces in the search market last year. Still, Google faces slowing growth in the advertising industry. Spending on U.S. search ads rose 7% in the third quarter, down from 12% in the previous three months, according to IgnitionOne Inc., an online marketing firm.
“We believe core search is holding up well, and display and mobile continue to deliver oversized growth,” Doug Anmuth, an analyst at JPMorgan Chase & Co. in New York, said today in a research note.
Interestingly, analysts are also anxious to know how Google+, the company’s social media network answer to Facebook, is doing. Depending on who consumers believe, Google+ is either growing or has grown stagnant.
However, later this week, Google will disclose its third-quarter results. The company has tried to expand sales by moving into new areas, including mobile-phone advertising and display ads.