Nielsen Online and comScore qSearch agree that Google was the top search engine in January, and they nearly agreed on exactly how much market share the search giant claimed during the first month of 2009.
According to Nielsen Online:
- Google took 62.8 percent of the U.S. search market in January, which translates into more than 5.9 billion queries. This gave Google a 40.8 percent year-over-year boost in its market share.
- Yahoo! finished January in second place with 16.2 percent of the search pie, according to Nielsen. This translates into 1.5 billion searches, reflecting year-over-year growth of 8.7 percent.
- MSN/Windows Live was third with 11.2 percent of the market, or nearly 1.1 billion queries. Microsoft’s search engine saw 18.3 percent year-over-year growth.
- AOL was fourth with 4.0 percent of the market, reflecting 8.9 percent year-over-year growth. Ask.com was fifth with 1.9 percent of the market, reflecting 1.0 percent year-over-year growth.
- My Web Search, Comcast Search, Yellow Pages Search, AT&T Worldnet Search and NexTag Search rounded out the top 10 list, according to Nielsen. Each of these smaller search providers finished with respective market shares of less than 1 percent.
According to comScore qSearch, Google finished January with 63.0 percent of the U.S. market, which was a 0.5 percentage point decline from December’s 63.5 percent mark. Approximately 8.5 billion queries were conducted on Google’s search engine in January.
- Yahoo! saw its market share increase to 21.0 percent in January, a 0.5 percentage point increase from 20.5 percent in December.
- Microsoft was third with 8.5 percent of the market, a slight increase from 8.3 percent in December.
- AOL LLC finished January with 3.9 percent of the market, up from 3.8 percent in the previous month, while the Ask Network had 3.7 percent of the market, a decline from its 3.9 percent share in December.
According to Nielsen, a total of 9.5 billion searches were carried out in January, while comScore pegs this figure at 13.5 billion.
Sources:</strong
Network
