Google keeps gaining search market share in the U.S., but its global dominance is not as great as previously indicated. Last night, comScore released its search market share and query growth numbers for July and Lehman Brothers reported the numbers in a note this morning.
Here are the main search market share percentage numbers in the U.S. from comScore:
Company—–July search share—Change from June, 2008
Google: 61.9 +0.4
Yahoo: 20.5 -0.4
AOL: 4.5 +0.2
Microsoft: 8.9 -0.3
Ask: 4.2 +0.1
According to the latest search query and market share numbers from comScore for July, Google’s U.S. market share inched upward to 61.9 percent (from 61.5 percent in June). While Google gained 0.4 percentage points in market share inJuly, yahoo lost the same amount.
And its search query volume in the U.S. held steady at a healthy 33.2 percent year-over-year rate (and accelreated slightly to 11.7 percent on a quarter-over-quarter basis). That quarter-over-quarter rate is what caused investor concern earlier this year, when it troughed at -0.3 percent in February. Since then it has re-accelerated every month to 4.4 percent in March, 6.1 percent in April, 9.9 percent in May, 10.0 percent in June, and now 11.7 percent in July.
Woldwide, Google’s search share declined from 67.9 percent in June to 64.1 percent in July. This drop was largely due changes in the way comScore measures search and Web traffic in China, Brazil, and Russia. As a result, Baidu’s global search market share went from 7.7 percent in June to 12.9 percent in July (based almost entirely on its strength in China alone). That makes Baidu the third largest search engine the world after Yahoo.
What the recalculation highlights is that Google faces more challenges to its dominance abroad than in the U.S. Baidu’s global quarter-over-quarter search query volume grew 98 percent in July, compared to 3.2 percent global growth for Google.
Here are the global numbers with Baidu (China) and NHN (South Korea Russia):
Company—–July search share—–Change from June, 2008
Google: 64.1 -3.8
Yahoo: 14.6 -1.0
Baidu 12.9 +5.2
Microsoft: 3.6 -0.2
NHN 2.1 -0.2
Ask: 1.6 -0.1
AOL: 1.0 -0.1
There may also be other reasons for Google’s ascension and Yahoo’s decline
It would be interesting to discover how many newbies are becoming searching for the first time by using Google.
Everyday people around the world are discovering Search Engines and using them for the first time.
So are these people using Google because they are being told to – instead of the previous years when they would search from the default homepage on IE – or were being told to use Yahoo (which was very popular among the students in the 1990s)?
Interesting statistics – it would be interesting to see the trends over a more extended period so we can infer more why Yahoo is going down – is it a result of people losing faith in Yahoo after the Microsoft/Yahoo battle or is it because people have less reason to go to Yahoo these days and so are not using their search.
It will be interesting to see Microsoft’s figures once their integration with Facebook happens.
worthless searches. these stats are as bad as using impressions to grade a site. a search engine cannot seriously graded by how many quieries it gets. it is the quality of the quieries. its all about conversion, user quality, retention. i bet 40-50% of googles traffic is garbage. savvy users know googles results are barbaric. google is the greatest bubble company in the history of the internet. they should sell bubble gum. GoogleGum “whatever sticks”.
You’re assumptions are entertaining. The more likely scenario is that Google’s number of queries are increasing because people are finding Google’s search to be more and more useful. On the flip-side, the remaining search share that Yahoo! and Microsoft have are likely due to people who don’t take search too seriously. I would be willing to bet that 50% or more of Yahoo’s and Microsoft’s searches are junk… mostly from people searching repeatedly, trying to find what they are looking for. Eventually, they abandon the search engine and head over to Google to perform one search which finds exactly what they need, and they never look back.
NHN is the owner of South Korean search engine Naver. It is not the owner of Russian search engine Yandex.
KillerLocator.com I agree with most of your comments, HOWEVER
“savvy users know googles results are barbaric.”
Savvy users know how to use Google and get optimum search results.
They are the best at what they do everyone else just follows.
I dont think there is nothing that difficult to find on the internet. a cure for cancer? now thats a real search engine result. Goog is not a leader at anything but cpc monkey junkie- 60%of rev. with up to 30% click fraud. innovation of a snail. i know from 10+ years customer service experience that the socalled “google loyalists” are few far and in between. I am sorry you have been googlewashed.
Killer is right, Google is the thang for now, but their eager push to own everything will soon catch up with them. I work in the marketing/search industry and it boggles/googles my mind that Yahoo! can’t get their sh*t together and take back a large share, MSN is always going to be a follower, they are a software company, search wasn’t the deal.
Glad to see their is still those that don’t drink the GoogleAid…
Very interesting. Microsoft search suck!
i really dont understand this. i switch to live about 6 months ago, just to see if i would miss the “great” results from google. guess what, i didnt notice any difference in the results. i never went back to google because it just didn’t matter. of course, use what ever you like, but i cant agree that Microsoft’s search sucks.
NHN is Korean, and the last time I checked, they didn’t have clear affiliations to Russian mafia.
Most of Baidu’s search share is increasing due to illegal mp3 downloads in China.
Actually it’s not like what u said, baidu provides a chunk of userful services to chinese and other countries users.
is that right?
It’s true… baidu (and more recently google) provide free mp3 downloads in China. If you try to access the same service from outside China you won’t get access.
Many of us are shocked by Internet censorship in China. … but what’s more important to you? CNN or free MP3s?
Comscore is notoriously inaccurate. Google is best of breed by far.
No mention of how Cash Back definitely hasn’t worked?
That would be against TC rules.
Don’t you see that since Google rose .4 and yahoo dropped .4 that means they took it right from Yahoo? Get with the program Tim.
Using the same logic used in this article it means that AOL and ASK took traffic from Microsoft.
Erick has taken over Arrington’s spot of Yahoo basher.
Scott, I agree. Don’t trust Comscore. Remember how off they were with results just a couple months ago with Google? Google is best of breed absolutely and the one that will top Google is Google itself because it is always improving and gaining marketshare. The drop has everything to do with ComScore’s changes in the way of measuring when in actually Google is growing hugely year after year. By the way did they figure Google India into this where the latest data by Nielsen shows Google has 81.4% marketshare and over 1 billion searches in just the month June 2008 alone?
I think its also a lot more to do with comfort factor, I dont recall when was the last time I used MSN or Yahoo on the flip side I have friends who are avid MSN users and they swear by them.
Yes my move from Yahoo to Google years back was just on the BUZZ that google created but never it happened that I intended to search something in google and I didnt find it.
Somehow the word “Google” became synonymous with “Search” now a days.
http://mydating...e.blogspot.com/
Google’s only interest is to destroy all internet businesses so they can soak up all the revenue.
Very interesting article. At the end of the day, it comes down to who is the best.There is only one and God(s) appointed. And the winner is GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOGLE!!!!!!!!!!
Nice post yes baidu has great impact from past few months.
Totoally agree, baidu made big progress in the market of search.
As everyone knows, Baidu is the most prominent search engine in China, the largest internet market in the world (# of users). It may one day overtake Google in search share, but revenue share will be another story. Internet advertising costs in China are tiny compared with the US, Europe and Japan. One question is how will Baidu increase the monetization of their Chinese search results?
While I love Google for what they do for webmaster, I also hope that there are more competition….check and balance
Google just keep getting bigger and bigger….not sure that is a good idea.
It is either Google is doing something right or it is Yahoo messing up their business. Yahoo better buck up.
I mostly use goggle search, I find it useful.
Baidu extorts web companies to keep their pages indexed, and will put anyone to the top who pays. Google’s page rank is far superior.
That’s partly a cultural difference. In China, if you’re willing to pay more, you’re seen as being a more reliable source.
The general Chinese population would often prefer to see the highest paying web companies first. It’s not seen as a conflict of interests in the same way it is in the US.