Analyst: Mobile Continues To Take Share From Desktop Search

Later today comScore will release its US search market share numbers for December 2012. Based on early release information from Wall Street analysts this is what the numbers will be:

• Google: 66.7 percent (vs. 67 percent in November)
• Bing: 16.3 percent (vs. 16.2 percent in November)
• Yahoo: 12.2 percent (vs. 12.1 percent in November)
• Ask: 3.0 percent (vs. 3.0 percent in November)
• AOL: 1.8 percent (vs. 1.7 percent in November)

What these data reflect is continued growth for Bing and general stability for Google at between 66 and 67 percent market share. However Yahoo-Bing Search Alliance has essentially produced no growth since its inception.

Today the combination controls just under 29 percent of search market share, which is essentially where it was when it formed in 2009. The deal has been a boon to Bing but a failure for Yahoo, which has continued to lose share to its partner.

Here’s what the December market share data look like compared with December 2011:

The bigger news, however, is that overall query volume appears to be declining as mobile devices cannibalize traffic. According to one analyst, “The declines of the past four months represent the first declines in total desktop search volume since we began tracking the data in 2006.”

We wrote about this last month, observing that In October 2011 “explicit core search queries” were 18.07 billion. In November 2012 there were more than a billion fewer queries.

It will take six months to a year of data to say definitively whether desktop search has peaked — and tablets may confound all this — but that’s what it appears.

Postscript: Here’s the official comScore release. In contrast to the above, comScore is reported a 4 percent gain in overall search query volume vs. last month.

However overall PC search query volume is down vs. December 2011.