According to the latest figures from comScore, Google increased its already-dominant search engine market share in December, while Microsoft finally jumped ahead of Yahoo.
Google Sites finished with 65.9 percent of the U.S. explicit core search market in December, up 0.5 percentage points from its 65.4 percent share in November.
Microsoft Sites finished in second with 15.1 percent of the market, up 0.1 percentage point from its 15.0 percent share in the previous month. Yahoo Sites fell to third with 14.5 percent, down 0.6 percentage points from its 15.1 percent share in November.
Ask Network was fourth with 2.9 percent of the market, followed by AOL Inc. with 1.6 percent – both unchanged from their marks in November.
According to comScore, more than 18.2 billion explicit core searches (“excludes contextually driven searches that do not reflect specific user intent to interact with the search results”) were conducted in December, up 2 percent from November.
In December, 68.1 percent of searches carried organic search results from Google, up from 67.6 percent in November. Meanwhile, 26.5 percent of searches were powered by Bing, down from 26.7 percent in November.
For the four weeks ending Jan. 7, “facebook” was the top search term with 3.94 percent of search clicks, according to Experian Hitwise. “Youtube” followed with 1.22 percent, while “craigslist” was third with 0.62 percent.
“Facebook.com” (0.51 percent), “yahoo” (0.42 percent), “ebay” (0.41 percent), “facebook login” (0.34 percent), “www.facebook.com” (0.29 percent), “amazon” (0.24 percent) and “walmart” (0.24 percent) rounded out the list of the top 10 overall search terms ranked by clicks.
Facebook was the top recipient of downstream clicks for the week ending Jan. 7, with 6.49 percent of clicks, according to Hitwise. YouTube had 3.48 percent of the downstream clicks for the week, while Gmail had 2.15 percent, Wikipedia had 1.41 percent and Yahoo Mail had 1.06 percent.
Google made headlines last week when it began to integrate Google+ into its search results pages. According to Peter Yared from CNET News, the most interesting aspect of this move by Google “is its tacit acknowledgement that its stalwart search links are largely irrelevant and might as well be replaced with social results. Google search results are essentially gamed results produced by search optimizers.”
Sources:
http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2012/1/comScore_Releases_December_2011_U.S._Search_Engine_Rankings
http://www.hitwise.com/us/datacenter/main/dashboard-10134.html
http://www.hitwise.com/us/datacenter/main/dashboard-23984.html
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57358850-93/why-google-is-ditching-search/
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