Search Landscape Holds Steady in May, Google Making Moves
The latest U.S. search figures from comScore are out, and they’re not all that astonishing. The search landscape remained virtually unchanged in May from April, though the leader of the pack is making moves that aren’t reflected in these numbers.
Google Sites finished atop the pile of the U.S. explicit core search market in May with 65.5 percent market share, up 0.1 percentage points from its 65.4 percent share in April. Yahoo Sites followed with 15.9 percent, unchanged from its share in April, while Microsoft Sites held 14.1 percent, also unchanged from the previous month.
Ask Network was fourth with 2.9 percent of the U.S. search market, down 0.1 percentage points from its 3.0 percent share in April, while AOL finished with an unchanged 1.5 percent share.
comScore notes that this was the second month of results that accounted for Yahoo Search Direct, the company’s new feature that delivers search results in real-time as users type their queries.
A total of 17.0 billion queries were conducted in May, according to comScore, up 5 percent from the 16.3 billion queries conducted in April.
Google Sites accounted for 11.2 billion queries, while Yahoo Sites had 2.7 billion and Microsoft Sites had 2.4 billion.
comScore also offered its “powered by” reporting, which showed that 67.8 percent of searches carried organic search results from Google, which is unchanged from the previous month. Meanwhile, 26.5 percent of searches were powered by Bing, also unchanged.
Google is testing a new search feature, which replaces the URL with the site’s name in search results snippets.
The search leader is also testing “Offer Ads,” which are different from Google Offers, though saved deals/offers are eventually sent to Google Offers. “This is noteworthy because it shows Google’s ‘offers’ portfolio is going to be larger than daily deals and success is not entirely contingent upon that individual product,” according to Greg Sterling, contributing editor at Search Engine Land. “Google intends to enable advertisers to broadly get in on the Offers/Wallet infrastructure.”
Google also made waves recently by acquiring AdMeld, a “yield optimization firm” that features a real-time marketplace for display ads.
Sources:
http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/6/comScore_Releases_May_2011_U.S._Search_Engine_Rankings
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/06/google-experiments-with-removing-urls.html
http://searchengineland.com/google-offer-ads-not-google-offers-in-the-wild-81418
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/helping-publishers-get-most-from.html
