Google Powered Nearly 7 out of 10 Organic Searches in April
According to comScore’s latest qSearch analysis of the U.S. search engine market, Google powered nearly 70 percent of all organic searches in April, leaving Bing with about 26 percent of organic searches.
Google Sites claimed 66.5 percent of explicit core searches in April, up 0.1 percentage points from its 66.4 percent share in March. By comScore’s definition, “explicit core search” doesn’t include contextually driven searches that don’t reflect specific user intent to interact with the search results.
Microsoft Sites followed with 15.4 percent of core searches, up 0.1 percentage points from its 15.3 percent share in March. Yahoo Sites followed with 13.5 percent of searches, down 0.2 percentage points from its 13.7 percent share in the prior month.
Ask Network was fourth with 3.0 percent of the market, unchanged from the previous month. AOL Inc. rounded out the list of the top five search engines with 1.6 percent of the market in April, also unchanged from the previous month.
In total, 17.1 billion explicit core searches were conducted in April, according to comScore. This was down 7 percent from the 18.4 billion searches conducted in March.
In April, Google Sites handled 11.4 billion explicit core searches, while Microsoft Sites handled 2.6 billion, Yahoo Sites handled 2.3 billion, Ask Network handled 511 million and AOL Inc. handled 271 million.
comScore also noted that in April, 68.7 percent of searches carried organic results from Google, up 0.1 percentage points from March. Meanwhile, 25.9 percent of searches carried organic results from Bing.
Bing is rolling out a new three-column interface in the coming weeks, with a broad availability in June. The core search results in the left-hand column will be joined by: “Snapshot,” a middle column highlighting information on specific places or topics; and “Sidebar,” a right-hand column showing recommendations/advice related to the query from friends, experts and enthusiasts.
The “Sidebar” column will highlight information from Facebook and Twitter, and will feature a search box for users to ask questions to their friends on Facebook. Foursquare, Quora and LinkedIn content is set to appear in the “Sidebar” too.
“Snapshot and sidebar are very eye-catching and may — at least initially — draw attention away from the core paid and organic results,” according to Performics. “Furthermore, snapshot pushes down right-side paid listings, thus increasing the importance of appearing in the top-sponsored listings.”
According to Experian Hitwise, the top five websites visited after search engines for the week ending May 12 were: 1) Facebook (6.71 percent of clicks), 2) YouTube (3.78 percent), 3) Gmail (2.37 percent), 4) Wikipedia (1.42 percent) and 5) Yahoo Mail (1.14 percent).
Sources:
http://blog.performics.com/search/2012/05/the-new-bing-implications-for-paid-organic-search.html
http://www.experian.com/hitwise/online-trends-search-engine.html
