Google Search Share Plateaus, BingHoo Gains, AOL Drops

The comScore search market share numbers for August are out. What they show is Google seeming to hit a kind of plateau. Over the past year it seems to be bumping up against a market share ceiling of around 65-66 percent. By contrast Yahoo and Bing gained slightly and now have a combined 31 percent of the US search market.

Ask held steady at 3 percent and AOL appears to be continuing its long, slow decline. By the end of the year AOL search should be at or below 1 percent of the overall market.

Google query volume and its share are flat; though mobile, which is growing rapidly, is not included in these figures. Yesterday research firm IDC predicted that by 2015 more people would access the internet via mobile devices than PCs.

That trend disproportionately favors Google over its immediate rivals because Google has a much larger share of mobile browser-based search than it does on the PC. If PC search query volumes grow overall so will Google. For now, however, there doesn’t seem to be much more growth available in terms of market share. Mobile is a different story and will continue to be an important growth driver for Google.

According to comScore there were a total of roughly 17 billion search queries in August across the five largest search engines. We can estimate that roughly 3.4 billion of those search queries are local or tied in some way to location. This is based on extrapolating from Google’s “20% of searches are related to location” formula.

We can also crudely estimate Google sees somewhere between 1.6 and 2.1 billion additional queries in mobile a month in the US.