Google’s U.S. search engine market share dipped below 65 percent for the first time since September 2009, according to comScore. Hitwise still shows Google’s market share at just over 65 percent. Meanwhile, Bing continues to make tiny gains.
Google’s U.S. search engine market share dipped below 65 percent for the first time since September 2009, according to comScore. Hitwise still shows Google’s market share at just over 65 percent. Meanwhile, Bing continues to make tiny gains.
The search engine rankings for August 2011, according to comScore were:
Although Google’s share of the pie hasn’t been this low since September 2009, it must be noted that 9 billion out of 13.8 billion searches were conducted on Google at that time. Meanwhile, Yahoo accounted for 2.6 billion searches and Bing for 1.3 billion searches (Bing launched in June 2009) in September 2009.
Comparing that to comScore’s latest data from August, more than 17.1 billion searches were conducted on search engines. Google ranked first with more than 11 billion searches (down 1 percent from July); Yahoo had 2.7 billion searches (up 1 percent); Bing had 2.5 billion (up 1 percent); Ask had 510 million (up 3 percent); and AOL had to 229 million (down 9 percent).
That means in just under two years, overall searches have increased by about 3.3 billion. Google has grabbed about two-thirds of those “new searches”, with Bing adding about 800 million, and Yahoo growing by about 100 million. Google doesn’t have anything to worry about quite yet.
On “powered by” organic searches, Google’s monthly share dropped to 66.8 percent (down from 67.2 percent in July) while Bing’s share grew to 27.1 percent (up from 26.8 percent).
Over on Hitwise, it was pretty much the same story, with Google losing a few percentage points, while Bing-powered search (Yahoo and Bing) grew to 28.99 percent in August, up from 28.05 percent in July).
Sixty-four more search engines Hitwise tracks accounted for 5.92 percent of U.S. searches.
Longer search queries, which Hitwise defines as averaging five to eight words or more, increased 3 percent in August and accounted for 26.26 percent of all search queries, while shorter queries declined 1 percent.
As usual, the five most visited sites from search engines remain Facebook, YouTube, Gmail, Google, and Wikipedia. The five most searched terms (as of Sept. 10) on Google were “facebook”; “youtube”; “facebook login”; “yahoo”; and “yahoo mail”.