Microsoft Continues Strong Search Growth, Facebook Cools Off
According to The Nielsen Company, Google maintained a healthy lead in the U.S. search market in April, but Microsoft showed that it still has plenty of legs – no thanks to Bing.
Google finished April with 65.1 percent of all searches in the U.S. during April, down from 65.7 percent in March.
The search giant recently received some bad press thanks to its admission that its Street View efforts in Europe gleaned some private information from Wi-Fi networks that didn’t use password protections. Google apologized, but it appears that Street View won’t be showing up in Germany any time soon.
Yahoo! held onto 13.5 percent of the market in April, up slightly from 13.4 percent in the previous month. Meanwhile MSN/Windows Live/Bing boasted 12.9 percent of the market, up from 12.2 percent in March.
AOL was fourth with 2.5 percent of the market, unchanged from March. Ask.com finished fifth with 1.9 percent of the market, also unchanged from the prior month.
My Web Search (1.1 percent), Comcast (0.5 percent), NexTag (0.3 percent), WhitePages.com Network (0.3 percent) and Yellow Pages (0.3 percent) rounded out the top 10 search providers, according to Nielsen.
In total, 9.1 billion searches were conducted in April, down 6.5 percent from 9.7 billion in March.
According to comScore, much of Microsoft’s growth may have come from its search properties besides Bing. While Microsoft/All Other saw a 19 percent surge in queries in April from March, Bing actually saw a 2 percent month-over-month dip.
While Google saw its query load remain virtually unchanged from March to April, YouTube/All Other experienced a 7 percent decline in searches, according to comScore. Meanwhile, Yahoo! handled 6 percent more queries overall in April.
Facebook, which has seen rapid growth in the search realm lately, seems to have cooled off in April, as its queries dipped 4 percent.
Fox Interactive Media and MySpace saw respective declines in the number of queries handled of 23 percent in April. Amazon saw an 8 percent boost in queries in April.
Sources:</strong
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/top-u-s-search-sites-for-april-2010/
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/nielsen-reports-march-2010-u-s-search-rankings/
http://www.pcworld.com/article/196423/google_wifi_data_collection_angers_european_officials.html/
