Google Gains in US Search Engine Market Share in February; Whitney Houston, Paula Deen, Kony 2012 Among the Fastest Moving Search Terms
According to comScore, Google gained more ground in the U.S. search engine market in February, while Yahoo! lost market share.
Google Sites finished February with 66.4 percent of the explicit core search market in February, up 0.2 percentage points from its 66.2 percent share in January.
Microsoft Sites was second with 15.3 percent, up 0.1 points from its 15.2 percent share in the previous month. Meanwhile, Yahoo! Sites followed with 13.8 percent of the search market in February, down 0.3 percentage points from its 14.1 percent share in January.
Ask Network was fourth with 3.0 percent of the market, unchanged from its mark in January. Meanwhile, AOL Inc. was fifth with 1.5 percent, down 0.1 percentage points from its 1.6 percent share in January.
According to comScore, “explicit core search” excludes contextually driven searches that don’t reflect specific user intent to interact with search results. In February, 17.6 billion explicit core searches were conducted, with Google Sites claiming 11.7 billion of these.
comScore also included its “Powered By” reporting, which indicated that 68.6 percent of searches in February carried organic search results from Google, up from 68.4 percent in January. Meanwhile, 26.2 percent of searches in February were powered by Bing, down from 26.5 percent in January.
Separate data from Experian Hitwise shows that “facebook” was the top overall search term for the four weeks ending March 10, claiming 3.60 percent of all search clicks. It was followed by “youtube” with 1.13 percent, “craigslist” with 0.66 percent, “facebook login” with 0.56 percent and “facebook.com” with 0.51 percent.
“Whitney houston will” was the top fast moving search term for the week ending March 10, compared with the week ending March 3. It was followed by “paula deen lawsuit,” “asteroid 2012 da 14,” “kony 2012” and “jessica simpson baby.”
According to Hitwise, the top fast moving search term on Twitter.com for the week ending March 10 was “kony 2012,” followed by “dank tree,” “usps tracking,” “drake quotes” and “twitter.”
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) subpoenaed Apple as part of its antitrust probe of Google. The FTC is looking into how Apple incorporates Google’s search engine on the iPhone and iPad.
“The subpoena indicates the FTC is intensifying its scrutiny of Google’s business practices,” according to a Businessweek article on the matter. “Details of the Apple-Google relationship may show whether Google is abusing its dominance of Internet search to boost revenue in the mobile phone advertising market, said Allen Grunes, an antitrust lawyer at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck LLP in Washington.”
Sources:
http://www.hitwise.com/us/datacenter/main/dashboard-10134.html
