Google Gains, Yahoo Loses Search Engine Market Share in January 2012
According to the latest figures from comScore, Google was up and Yahoo was down in January’s search engine rankings. Separate figures from Experian Hitwise reveal that “Facebook” continues to dominant the top 10 overall search terms.
Google Sites finished with 66.2 percent of the U.S. explicit core search market in January, according to comScore. This was up 0.3 percentage points from its 65.9 percent share in December.
Microsoft Sites was second with 15.2 percent of the market in January, up 0.1 percentage points from its 15.1 percent share in December. Meanwhile, Yahoo Sites claimed 14.1 percent of the market in January, down 0.4 percentage points from its 14.5 percent share in the previous month. Together, the Microsoft-Yahoo combination nabbed 29.3 percent of the market in January, down from its 29.6 percent share in December.
Ask Network was fourth with 3.0 percent of the market, up 0.1 percentage points from its 2.9 percent share in the previous month. Meanwhile, AOL finished January with 1.6 percent of the search market, unchanged from its share in December.
According to comScore, 17.8 billion total explicit core search queries were conducted in January, down 2 percent from the 18.2 billion queries conducted in December. Google claimed 11.8 billion of these queries, followed by Microsoft with 2.7 billion, Yahoo with 2.5 billion, Ask with 527 million and AOL with 277 million.
comScore also noted that 68.4 percent of searches in January carried organic search results from Google, up from 68.1 percent in December. Meanwhile, 26.5 percent of searches were powered by Bing, unchanged from December.
Separate figures from Hitwise show that for the four weeks ending Feb. 4, “facebook” was the top overall search term, with 3.63 percent of search clicks. “Youtube” followed with 1.11 percent of clicks, while “craigslist” was third with 0.65 percent of clicks.
“Facebook login” (0.47 percent), “facebook.com” (0.45 percent), “yahoo” (0.42 percent), “ebay” (0.39 percent), www.facebook.com (0.28 percent), “amazon” (0.19 percent) and “mapquest” (0.18 percent) rounded out the top 10 overall search terms in the observed time period.
Google Fellow and senior vice president Amit Singhal recently discussed the future of Google’s search engine, which would go beyond words and into entities, attributes and the relationship between those entities.
Singhal said Google is “building a huge, in-house understanding of what an entity is and a repository of what entities are in the world and what should you know about those entities.”
The search company’s 2010 purchase of Freebase, a community-built knowledge base of about 12 million canonical entities, is a foundation for this venture, but Google has invested in building out a huge knowledge graph of interconnected entities and their attributes.
Sources:
http://www.hitwise.com/us/datacenter/main/dashboard-10134.html
