New York — Google has long commanded the Internet, while it still holds onto its first-place spot in the U.S. search engine market last month, but recently, Yahoo made a surprising, though slight advance as Google lost ground and Yahoo gained back some U.S. market share last month. This finding is according to comScore Inc.
Google, the dominant Goliath in the search engine market, captured 65.8% of the market in July, according to comScore, a market research company. However, the search engine giant stumbled a bit last month, dipping 0.4% from 66.2% in June.
Where did that 0.4% share go? Google can look to Yahoo for that.
While Yahoo, which enjoyed No. 2 position in terms of market share, had 17.1% of searches in comparison to Google’s 65.8%, up from 16.7% in June, according to Reston, Virginia-based comScore. The number 3 player, Microsoft Corp.’s Bing remained unchanged with 11 percent.
Yahoo and Microsoft are none too delighted to allow Google to monopolize all the search-based advertising revenue and have decided to team up together in a 10-year agreement to take on the search giant. As part of the agreement, Yahoo will use Bing’s search technology on its sites.
comScore’s findings from July include a new group, known as “explicit core search” that will track users whose primary intent is to retrieve search results. Market share gains by both Yahoo and Bing have been a result of clicks on so-called contextual searchers, such as a slideshow viewing. Industry pundits anticipate the U.S. search-ad market may grow 16% this year while the overall online advertising market will expand 11%, according to estimates by eMarketer Inc. in New York.
Microsoft’s Bing has been moving firmly in third place since it was launched a little more than a year ago, and it maintains that position with an 11% share — the same amount it had in June. Bing had better luck between May and June.
According to a June report from comScore indicated that Bing demonstrated more growth than rival Google, compared to the previous month. Bing, which celebrated its first anniversary in late May, saw its search share in the U.S. market inch up from 12.1% in May to 12.7% in June. In that same May to June period, Google lost a little ground with its search share dipping from 63.7% in May to 62.6% last month.
Beginning this week, Yahoo will commence the process of transitioning Microsoft’s search technology to power its own query results in the U.S. and Canada, according to a company blog post today. The company is also making formative tests this week for the transfer of some paid-search accounts to Microsoft. The full transition is slated to happen this year, Yahoo said.
Yahoo, based in Sunnyvale, California, rose 15 cents to $13.94 at 4 p.m. New York time on the Nasdaq Stock Market. Google, based in Mountain View, California, rose $4.93 to $490.52, while Microsoft, based in Redmond, Washington, rose 34 cents to $24.71.