Google Loses, Yahoo and Microsoft Gain in April Search Rankings
The latest figures from comScore show that Google shed some of its dominating search market share in April, while Yahoo and Microsoft picked some tenths-of-a-percentage up.
Google Sites finished April with 65.4 percent of the U.S. market, down 0.3 percentage points from its 65.7 percent share in March.
Yahoo Sites trailed Google with 15.9 percent of the market in April, up 0.2 points from its 15.7 percent share in the previous month. According to comScore, Yahoo’s April market share reflects “the impact of Yahoo! Search Direct, Yahoo!’s new feature that delivers search results in real-time while users type their query. Yahoo! Search Direct was available only on Yahoo! U.S. Web Search for the month of April.”
Microsoft Sites, Yahoo’s partner in crime in the search game, finished third with 14.1 percent of the market in April, up 0.2 percentage points from its 13.9 percent share in March.
Ask Network finished April with 3.0 percent of the market, while AOL Inc. finished with 1.5 percent. Each of these two search engines shed 0.1 points respectively from their marks in March.
comScore also included “powered by” data to take into account “the share of algorithmic explicit searches that are powered by Google and Bing, and branded as such to the consumer.” Google’s “powered by” market share, including searches conducted at Google entities, as well as branded searches at AOL and Ask, was 67.8 percent in April. Bing’s “powered by” market share, including searches conducted at Microsoft entities, as well as branded Yahoo entities, was 26.5 percent.
In total, Americans conducted nearly 18.1 billion total core searches in April, down 4 percent from the 18.9 billion total core searches observed in March, according to comScore.
The still-biggest search engine in the land stole headlines with its Google I/O 2011 event. Google clearly showcased its intent to firmly place its feet down into areas of consumers’ live outside of the browser. Among the big announcements were a movie-rental service; Music Beta, with cloud storage and streaming; the Accessory Development Kit, which would enable Android devices to collect data or become a controller; and the latest Chromebook.
Meanwhile, Bing recently ramped up its integration of Facebook data in its search results. Microsoft will display search results to users that are influenced in part by what their Facebook friends liked or share via the social networking site; it claims that its partnership with Facebook will allow it to go further in this integration than Google.
Sources:</strong
http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/05/google-io-2011-5-things-to-watch.html
