Almost Half of February Searches Were Googled
February was just another month in search that was dominated by Google. According to individual reports issued by Nielsen//NetRatings and comScore Media Metrix, Google held on to its top spot in the share of the overall U.S. search market. Nielsen//NetRatings indicated that Google took 48.5% of the pie, while comScore Media Metrix says Google took 42.3% of the total share. Google’s share according to comScore last year was 36.3%.
Yahoo! held on to its number two spot, capturing 22.5% of the market according to Nielsen//NetRatings, or 27.6% according to comScore. This number is down from 31.1% last year.
MSN continues to trail behind at third place, taking a 10.7% share according to Nielsen//NetRatings’ numbers, or 13.5% if you are using comScore’s calculations.
ComScore indicated that Ask.com improved upon its share of 5.3% last year, rising to 6% this year.
On the topic of year-to-year growth, the two research firms also differ quite significantly in their findings. If you ask Nielsen//NetRatings, they will tell you that overall queries in the U.S. jumped 38% from last February’s 3.8 billion to February 2006’s 5.3 billion figure. However, comScore says that the growth is only 11%. This difference was also seen in the two firms’ January reports.
Nielsen//NetRatings also delved into image search figures and found that in terms of year-to-year growth, the overall market grew 91%. As expected, Google garnered the most queries at 71.9%, with Yahoo! trailing behind at 19.1% and Ask.com rounding out the top three at 3.5%. MSN followed with 2.3%, while AOL took 1.4% of the total share.
Despite the differences in numbers, it seems that Nielsen//NetRatings and comScore can agree that Google is still king of a growing search market.
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