Google Loses Search Share

According to comScore Networks’ monthly qSearch analysis of search engine activity released on Sunday, Google actually saw its share of online searches decrease in the month of July 2006, while Yahoo!, Time Warner, and Ask each saw Google’s loss as their gain.

After 11 consecutive months of seeing increasing search share, Google finally dropped 1% of its share to finish July with 43.7% of the search market. This figure is a 7.2% increase from July of 2005’s 36.5% share.

Yahoo!’s share increased 0.3% to 28.8% of the search market, though this was a 1.7% decline from July of last year.

Time Warner’s AOL saw a 0.3% increase as well, giving it 5.9% of the pie. However, this number is a disappointing 4.0% drop from last year’s 9.9% share.

Ask’s search share also grew 0.3%, which gives it 5.4% of the market.

MSN-Microsoft’s share remained the same at 12.8%, which is a 2.7% drop from last year’s 15.5% search market share.

The report also indicated that 6.3 billion search queries were run by Americans in July. This is a 2% decline from June, “reflecting seasonal declines typically seen in July,” according to the analysis. This number is a 30% increase from search volume in July of 2005.

Google took the largest portion of this search volume with 2.7 billion searches run on their engine, while Yahoo! saw 1.8 billion searches run on theirs. MSN-Microsoft took 802 million of these queries, while AOL took 366 million, and Ask took 338 million.

When it came to toolbars, Google and Yahoo! remained the powerhouses. Google’s toolbar grabbed 50.3% of toolbar search queries, while Yahoo!’s received 46.2% of toolbar searches.

Source:

http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=984