comScore Search Data: Google Gains, Yahoo Falls To "Lowest Level Ever"

comScore Search Data: Google Gains, Yahoo Falls To “Lowest Level Ever”

Oct 11, 2011 at 7:08am ET by Greg Sterling

It’s that time again; the financial analysts are trickling out their advanced look at September search market share data from comScore ahead of the official release of those numbers. Our look at the data comes courtesy of Macquarie Equities Research and UBS.

Google regained some share in September, at Yahoo’s expense. And AOL was up slightly vs. last month. Bing and Ask were flat compared to August. Total “explicit core search queries” in September were also flat vs. August (17.1 billion) but showed growth vs. a year ago.

Here are the numbers:

Google: 65.3 percent (vs. 64.8 percent in August)
Yahoo: 15.5 percent (16.3 percent in August)
Bing: 14.7 percent (flat vs August)
Ask: 3.0 (flat vs August)
AOL: 1.5 percent (vs. 1.3 in August)

Macquarie said that Yahoo’s 15.5 share “was its lowest level ever according to our dataset.” However queries at Yahoo Shopping gained, according to UBS discussion of the data.

We’ll update this post when comScore officially releases its data later today.

Postscript: Here are the official numbers:

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Features: Analysis | Stats: comScore | Top News

About The Author: Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog Screenwerk, about SoLoMo issues and connecting the dots between online and offline. He also posts at Internet2Go, which is focused on the mobile Internet. Follow him @gsterling. See more articles by Greg Sterling

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TheresaB

I was under the impression that comScore Search Data was skewed when assessing market share. Rand Fishkin also supported this view in a recent White Board Friday http://mz.cm/nktLRW-

“comScore is counting all searches on the Microsoft networks and on Yahoo’s network. Yahoo has a huge content network. Microsoft has billions of web pages. Any searches performed internally on those sites count towards the search share, versus Google, who basically has very few actual web properties, media properties, content properties, so all the searches go offsite to somewhere else. Very few of these searches stay on Google verus Bing and Yahoo where a large percentage of the searches that are performed end up back on Microsoft or Yahoo properties.”
TimmyTime

@Theresa,
Rand the self-proclaimed expert! Nothing must go by without him commenting. I don’t know the whole story but he is clueless in this: “Google, who basically has very few actual web properties, media properties, content properties”. Hey Rand, ever head of Youtube? It’s the world’s second largest search engine and #3 site on the entire web and growing since Panda and Universal Search. How about Gmail?

From Rand still – “Everyone’s website shows that they are getting between, let’s say, 80% and 90% of their search traffic from Google. So, if Google’s market share is 65%, how is this possible?”

If everyone has 4 heads, how come books say people have one head? Oh, it’s not true that people have 4 heads. Not all sites show 80%-90% of G traffic search.

I wish someone would explain the mystery in ‘completing a search’ or whatever they call it. There’s a 15% difference between Google and Bing but I’m not sure how they calculated it.