Dec 28, 2007 at 3:04pm ET by Danny Sullivan
Continuing on from my earlier post about Nielsen Online’s latest search popularity stats, I’m now moving to those from comScore. For November 2007 — as with Nielsen — it’s the same-old, same-old. Google’s on top, followed by Yahoo and Microsoft. But in terms of raw searches, while Google still shows gains, at least Yahoo can point to six months’ worth of holding steady.
The comScore stats are here, showing the share of all searches handled by the five "core" search engines, as comScore calls them:
Here are the numbers in pie chart format:
How about the trend over time? Unfortunately, I can’t show a full year. That’s because comScore significantly changed its ratings methodology back in July 2007, making figures they’ve reported in the past not comparable to those from that month forward. But I can show you the last six months:
The stats show Google continuing to gain share against its two major competitors, Yahoo and Microsoft. However (and per my standard caveats below), in terms of number of searches (rather than the share of the overall pie), Yahoo’s pretty much held its own over the past six months, staying in the 2.3 billion range. Number of searches handled by each search engine, shown in billions:
Notice in particular the large Google spike in number of searches as of October 2007 (from 5.4 billion to 6.2 billion), which continued into November 2007 (5.9 billion). The best guess (and it is a guess) I have for this change is likely down to heavy Google users returning to school. Of course, other search engines also have school users. But it might be that Google has significantly more of them, enough to register a half-billion searches gain.
Also keep in mind that the total number of searches used for the charts above represent searches only at the "core" search engines, which comScore defines as:
Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in the core search numbers.
In total, core searches totaled 10.5 billion in November 2007. In contrast, "expanded" searches that reflect anywhere search activity happens (such as eBay or Craigslist) totaled 13.9 billion searches.
Caveat Time!
As a reminder, my general rules when evaluating popularity stats:
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