According to three separate companies, Google sat atop the U.S. search engine heap in December.
Google grabbed 65.7 percent of searches in the last month of 2009, according to comScore. This reflected an increase of 0.1 percentage points from 65.6 percent in November.
Yahoo! was second with 17.3 percent of the market, 0.2 points down from 17.5 percent in the prior month. Microsoft was third with 10.7 percent of the U.S. search market in December, 0.4 points up from its 10.3 percent share in November.
Ask.com was fourth with 3.7 percent, down 0.1 points, while AOL LLC was fifth with 2.6 percent, down 0.2 points.
There were 14.7 billion searches conducted in the U.S. during December, according to comScore.
Nielsen agrees that Google was the top search engine in December, though it pegged its share at 67.3 percent. Yahoo! followed with 14.4 percent of the U.S. search market, while MSN/Windows Live/Bing was third with 9.9 percent.
AOL was fourth with 2.5 percent of the search market in December, while Ask.com was fifth with 1.7 percent, according to Nielsen. The company noted that 9.9 billion searches were conducted during the month.
Meanwhile, Experian Hitwise reported Google’s market share to be at 72.25 percent in December, up 1 percent from its 71.57 percent share in November.
Yahoo! trailed behind with 14.83 percent, down 4 percent. Bing was third with 8.92 percent, down 4 percent, while Ask.com was fourth with 2.54 percent, down 4 percent also.
According to the company, the remaining 66 search engines accounted for 1.48 percent of all U.S. searches in December.
Experian Hitwise also noted that while shorter searches remained relatively unchanged in December from November, queries that were seven words were down 2 percent, while queries that were eight words or more were down 5 percent.
Sources:
http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/1/comScore_Releases_December_2009_U.S._Search_Engine_Rankings
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/nielsen-reports-december-u-s-search-rankings/
http://www.hitwise.com/us/press-center/press-releases/search-enginedec2009/
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