According to three major reports, Microsoft’s Bing was the search engine that had the strongest January, while Google and Yahoo! struggled.
Experian Hitwise’s most recent report pegged Google’s U.S. search engine market share at 71.49 percent in January, down 1 percent from its 72.25 percent share in December. Yahoo! claimed 14.57 percent of the pie, down 2 percent from its 14.83 percent share in December.
Bing finished January with 9.37 percent of the market, up 5 percent from its 8.92 percent share in December, according to Experian Hitwise. Ask.com was fourth with 2.64 percent of the market, up 4 percent from its 2.54 percent share in December.
Experian Hitwise also noted that longer search queries were more popular in January, as those averaging five to more than eight words in length were up 5 percent from December.
The story was very similar according to comScore, which reported that Google had 65.4 percent of the market in January, down 0.3 percentage points from its 65.7 percent share in December. Yahoo! finished with 17.0 percent of the market, down 0.3 points from its 17.3 percent share in the previous month.
Microsoft saw its market share rise to 11.3 percent in January, up 0.6 points from 10.7 percent in December. Bing experienced 11 percent growth in query volume during the month, as it handled more than 1.5 billion searches.
Ask Network finished with 3.8 percent of the market in January, while AOL LLC finished with 2.5 percent, according to comScore.
Nielsen reported a 66.3 percent market share for Google in January, while Yahoo! was second with 14.5 percent. MSN/Windows Live/Bing finished with 10.9 percent of the market, up from 9.9 percent in December.
A recent study conducted by Wunderman, BrandAsset Consulting, ZAAZ and Compete shows that search engine users perceive brands differently. For instance, Bing users tend to be early adopters and have favorable interactions with Walmart, while Google and Yahoo! users are more middle-of-the-road, with Google giving Hotwire better conversions, but Bing giving it more visitors and shoppers.
The moral of the story? “This research demonstrates that marketers have a real choice to make when formulating search strategies,” according to Shane Atchison of ZAAZ.
Sources:</strong
http://www.hitwise.com/us/press-center/press-releases/google-searches-01-10/
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/u-s-web-searches-top-10-2-billion-in-january/
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