February was a tough month for every search engine whose name did not start with “G.”
The most recent figures released by comScore’s qSearch indicate that Google had a 48.1% share of the total U.S. search market in February, which was a 0.6% increase from the previous month. Sadly, Google was the only one of the major search engines to gain market share in February.
Yahoo! stood still with 28.1% of the market, placing it behind Google at second place. Microsoft held onto its third spot with 10.5% of the market, which was a 0.1% decline from January.
Ask.com lost 0.2% and dropped to a 5.0% share of the search market in the U.S., while Time Warner’s AOL lost 0.1% to drop to a 4.9% share of the market.
For the month of February, Americans conducted 6.9 billion queries. This figure was a 1% increase from January, and a 19% jump from February of last year.
Google handled 3.3 billion of those queries, Yahoo! 2 billion, Microsoft 730 million, Ask.com 348 million, and Time Warner sites 338 million.
In January of 2006, Google held 41.4% of the market, and has since disproved all those who had fears of their market share declining. There are still whispers of the commoditization of the search engine realm, but there has been little or no concrete evidence of this so far.
Sources:
http://clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3625334
http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=21739
&hed=Google%E2%80%99s+Market+Share+Gets+Bigger
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