A month after Bing surpassed Yahoo to became the No. 2 search engine in the U.S., Yahoo’s search share continued to decline in the New Year, according to comScore. Meanwhile, Google climbed past a 66 percent share of the search market.
The search engine rankings for January 2012, according to comScore, were:
- Google grew to 66.2 percent (up from 65.9 percent in December 2011).
- Bing grew to 15.2 percent (up from 15.1 percent).
- Yahoo fell to 14.1 percent (down from 14.5 percent).
- Ask grew to 3 percent (up from 2.9 percent).
- AOL remained unchanged at 1.6 percent.
At this time last year, Google had 65.6 percent market share; Bing was in third place at 13.1 percent; Yahoo was in second place with 16.1 percent; Ask was at 3.4 percent; and AOL was at 1.7 percent.
Google’s share hasn’t been this high since November 2010, when Google commanded 66.2 percent of the search market, according to comScore.
More than 17.8 billion explicit core searches were conducted in January. This is down 2 percent from December. Google led the way with 11.8 billion of the total searches (down 2 percent from December); Bing ended up with 2.7 billion (down 2 percent), followed close by Yahoo with 2.5 billion (down 5 percent). Ask Network had 527 million searches (down 1 percent), followed by AOL with 277 million (down 3 percent).
In January, 68.4 percent of searches carried organic search results from Google (up from 68.1 percent in December), while Bing powered around 26.5 percent of searches – unchanged from December.