According to new data released by digital analytics company ComScore yesterday, 66.7 percent of users core searches in September were on Google, which is 0.3 percent higher than August. Trailing behind were Microsoft’s search engines, which got 15.9 percent of the market share, and Yahoo came in third with 12.2 percent — which is down 0.6 percent from August.
Just a year and a half ago, Yahoo’s search market share was 16 percent, by January it was 14, and now it’s down to 12. More than 16.3 billion explicit core searches were conducted in September, with Google Sites ranking first with 10.9 billion. Microsoft Sites ranked second with 2.6 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2 billion, Ask Network with 565 million (up 3 percent) and AOL, Inc. with 287 million.
Other data from ComScore’s report today shows that millions of people are still conducting billions of searches each month. According to the analytics company, people in the U.S. searched more than 16.3 billion times in September. Although that number seems high, it’s actually down slightly from August, when people searched more than 17 billion times. Of these searches, 10.9 billion were done on Google, and 2.6 billion were on Microsoft sites.
The searches counted in this data are from home and work computers, not mobile devices. Other research out today from the Macquarie Group shows that desktop Web search declined in September for the first time since it began tracking this data in 2006. Macquarie analysts said in their report that the increasing number of mobile searches appears to be the biggest reason for the decline.
