U.S. search volume in January 2006 was 39% greater than traffic at the same time last year, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. Online searches across 60 search engines in the U.S. rose from 4 billion at the beginning of 2005 to nearly, 5.7 billion by the end of January 2006, the Web measurement firm reported.
Those 5.7 billion searches conducted online mark the highest monthly traffic rate so far, Nielsen reported.
“Web users are conducting more searches not because they can’t find what they’re looking for but because search as a utility has become deeply ingrained into people’s everyday lives,” said Ken Cassar, chief analyst for Nielsen//NetRatings.
As to where those searches are taking place, Nielsen found that the top three engines’ January market share remained relatively stable year over year. Google had 48.2% of search share for the month, a 1.1% increase over its portion of the traffic in the same month 2005. Yahoo! Search captured about 21.2% of search volume for the month, up less than 1% from 2005. And MSN Search market share declined 1.8% year-over-year to 12.8% of searches in January 2006.
Eaerlier last week, comScore Media Metrix put the growth in U.S. January searches from 2005 to 2006 at a lower rate of 11%. But that lower increase was due to a higher search count for January 2005 than Nielsen’s. ComScore tabulated the total January search volume as 5.5 billion– very close to Nielsen//NetRatings’ 5.7 billion figure.
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