“Success” in the search market can apparently come in different forms. While Google continues to dominate in terms of overall search share, Bing continues to lead the pack in terms of “success rate.”
According to comScore, Google claimed 65.6 percent of the U.S. search market, down 1 percentage point from the 66.6 percent share it held in December. Yahoo followed with 16.1 percent of the market, up from 16.0 percent in December.
Microsoft was third with 13.1 percent in January, up 1.1 points from its 12.0 percent share in the previous month, while Ask.com followed with 3.4 percent of the market, down from its 3.5 percent share in December.
AOL rounded out the top five list with 1.7 percent of the market, down from 1.9 percent in December.
There were 17 billion searches conducted in the U.S. in January, up 3 percent from 16 billion in December, according to comScore.
“In January, 68.2 percent of searches carried organic search results from Google, while 25.6 percent of searches were powered by Bing organic results,” notes comScore.
According to Experian Hitwise, Google grabbed 67.95 percent of U.S. searches in January, while Bing-powered search claimed 27.44 percent of the market.
However, Bing had a success rate of 81.54 percent in January, while Yahoo had a success rate of 81.38 percent and Google had a success rate of 65.58 percent.
Hitwise defines success rate as the number of searches conducted that resulted in a visit to a website. “The share of unsuccessful searches highlights the opportunity for both the search engines and marketers to evaluate the search engine result pages to ensure that searchers are finding relevant information,” the company notes.
Amazon remained the top retail site receiving paid-search traffic, getting 11.25 percent of all paid clicks for the four weeks ending Jan. 29. Target followed with 5.18 percent, while JC Penney had 3.33 percent, Sears had 2.98 percent and Lowe’s had 2.85 percent.
Queries that were 5-8 words in length were up 5 percent in January from December, according to Hitwise. Shorter queries – those 1-4 words long – were down 1 percent.
Sources:
http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/2/comScore_Releases_January_2011_U.S._Search_Engine_Rankings
http://www.hitwise.com/us/press-center/press-releases/bing-searches-increase-twenty-one-percent/
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