Yahoo’s share of U.S. searches has fallen consistently following the announcement of its search alliance with Microsoft in July 2009, when it accounted for around 20 percent of U.S. searches, comScore estimates.
In December that trend continued, seeing its share dip a further 0.4 percentage points versus November. Meanwhile, Microsoft continues to grow its share of searches, suggesting its Bing product will overtake Yahoo search as the second largest engine by the end of the year.
Market leader Google continues to dominate the space, however, accounting for two-thirds of U.S. searches in December. Google’s share grew by 0.4 percent between November and December.
| Explicit Core Share* of U.S. Searches Among Leading Providers, December 2010 vs November 2010 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Share of Searches (%) | ||||
| Domain | November 2010 | December 2010 | Month-over-Month Point Change (%) |
|
| Google Sites | 66.2 | 66.6 | 0.4 | |
| Yahoo Sites | 16.4 | 16.0 | -0.4 | |
| Microsoft Sites | 11.8 | 12.0 | 0.2 | |
| Ask Network | 3.6 | 3.5 | -0.1 | |
| AOL Network | 2.0 | 1.9 | -0.1 | |
| Note: Data is based on the five major search engines including partner searches and cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in the core search numbers.
*Excludes contextually driven searches that do not reflect specific user intent to interact with search results. |
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| Source: comScore 2010 | ||||