According to recent figures released by comScore Networks, Google remains the dominant king of the search engine realm. In January of 2007, it gained 0.2% from the previous month to claim 47.5% of all search queries conducted by Americans at home, work, and school.
Yahoo! sites retained its second place spot with 28.1% of the total market. However, this number was a 0.4% drop from December’s 28.5% share.
Microsoft sites gained 0.1% from the previous month to take 10.6% of the total market in January. The Ask Network lost 0.2%, but still held onto its fourth slot with 5.2% of the market, while the Time Warner Network gained 0.1% to take 5.0% of all queries in the U.S.
Microsoft also made a big jump into the medical search game with the acquisition of health care search engine Medstory on Monday.
In addition to these rankings, comScore’s monthly qSearch analysis indicated that there were 6.9 billion online searches in January, which was a 2% increase from December. This figure was also a 26% jump from January of last year.
Google sites gobbled up 3.3 billion queries in January, while Yahoo sites had 1.9 billion, Microsoft sites took 733 million, the Ask Network had 361 million, and Time Warner took in 342 million queries.
In terms of online properties with the most growth in January, tax preparation was key. The IRS saw a 205% increase in the number of unique visitors it had in January as opposed to the audience in December. The IRS Web site saw a unique audience of 13.3 million users. Intuit’s audience grew 189% to 11.5 million users, while ED.gov saw an 87% growth in its unique audience, which was 7.1 million users in January.
Travelocity, CareerBuilder.com, MoveNetwork.com, Classified Ventures, Dominion Enterprises, Belo, and CA.gov were also benefactors of a bigger unique audience in January.
Taxes as a category grew 199% from December to January, giving it a unique audience of 22.4 million users.
Despite losing ground in the search engine battle, Yahoo! sites still reigned supreme in the overall Web property race. Yahoo! sites were tops in this regard, with a unique audience of 129.2 million users in January. Time Warner network was second, Microsoft sites were third, Google sites were fourth, and eBay was fifth.
Fox Interactive Media, Amazon.com, Ask.com network, Wikipedia sites, and New York Times Digital rounded out the top 10 list for January.
Sources:
http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=1219
http://clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3625080
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