Look out, Google. In the annual American Customer Satisfaction Index for search engines, Bing has practically matched the search leader's consumer satisfaction score for the second year in a row, with Ask.com not that far behind. Bing Barely Behind Google The scores look like this: Google: 82 points Bing: 81 points Ask.com: 80 points Yahoo: 78 points On the ASCI scale, 100 would be a perfect score. Google earned 82, or what I'd call a B letter grade. But Bing was just behind by one point, and that makes it effectively tied with Google. Writes ACSI: Once trailing Google by [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Features: Analysis | Stats: Popularity | Stats: Relevancy | Top News

Google and Bing have reached all-time high levels, while Yahoo reached an all-time low in the latest comScore search market share numbers. They're due to be released publicly later today or tomorrow, but financial analysts have seen and are sharing their copies of the data. According to comScore's explicit search market share report for June 2012 -- which covers desktop searches only, not mobile -- the numbers are as follows: Google: 66.8 percent in June, up from 66.7 percent in May; an all-time high for Google Bing: 15.6 percent in June, up from 15.4 percent in May; an all-time high [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Stats: comScore | Stats: Popularity | Top News

Google continues to hold a death-grip on search market share in the U.S., but Experian Hitwise says that Bing has taken five percent of Google's market share in the last 12 months. According to Hitwise's market share stats for May 2012, Google accounted for 65 percent of all U.S. searches -- down from 68 percent a year ago. Meanwhile, Bing-powered searches in May accounted for 28.1 percent, which is up from 26.8 percent last year at this time. That's a five percent year-over-year decline for Google, and a five percent gain for Bing-powered search share. Hitwise credits Yahoo with [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Stats: Hitwise | Stats: Popularity | Top News

The financial analysts are starting to expose search market share data for May, ahead of the official release of those numbers by comScore tomorrow. If they're accurate the data we saw reflect another monthly decline for Yahoo and AOL. Bing was flat while Google gained. Here are the numbers: Google: 66.7 percent in May (vs. 66.5 percent in April) Bing: 15.4 percent (vs. 15.4 percent in April and 14.1 percent a year ago) Yahoo: 13.4 percent (vs. 13.5 percent in April; and 15.9 percent a year ago) Ask: 3 percent (vs. 3 percent in April) AOL: 1.5 percent (vs. 1.6 percent in April) [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Stats: comScore | Stats: Popularity | Top News

By the end of April, traffic to Blekko will likely have quadrupled since January 1st, and the company has a handful of reasons why it thinks that's happening. More on the explanation later; first, the numbers. The "slashtags" search engine has already seen a 337 percent gain in unique visitors this year. That's as of yesterday (Monday) afternoon, and there are still two weeks left in the month. Blekko shared the chart below from its internal analytics, showing a gain in unique IPs visiting the site from 1.58 million in December to 5.33 million so far in April. Blekko saw visits f [...]

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

Last week the Pew Internet Project released findings of a survey on search, personalization and targeted advertising. In a nutshell, survey respondents had a very positive view of search and the quality of search results. Yet the majority gave an unequivocal thumbs down to search personalization (and behavioral targeting). This isn't necessarily a contradiction or paradox in the abstract, but it is when you consider that the most popular search engine is moving aggressively in a direction most people say they don't want search to go. Here's our earlier coverage of the survey: Pew Repo [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Features: Analysis | Google: Personalized Search | Google: Privacy | Google: Search Plus Your World | Google: Web Search | Legal: Privacy | Stats: Popularity | Stats: Search Behavior

Localeze, 15 Miles and comScore released findings from their 5th Local Search Study. The survey of 4,000 US adults (together with behavioral data) documents how consumers search for and find local business information across digital platforms. It's a pretty comprehensive study and there are a great many interesting pieces of data, some of which I've written up here and here. In this article I want to focus on a single finding: 49 percent of smartphone and tablet owners are using apps to find local information. On one level this is unremarkable and makes sense; apps are popular and there are [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Mobile | Google: Maps & Local | Google: Mobile | Search Engines: Location / Checkin Services | Search Engines: Maps & Local Search Engines | Stats: comScore | Stats: Popularity | Stats: Search Behavior

With its msnNOW site barely two weeks old, Microsoft is already reaping benefits on another property: increased traffic to its Bing search engine. But the way it's happening may also lead to artificial increases in Bing's market share numbers. First, the traffic stats: Experian Hitwise tells us that downstream traffic from msnNOW to Bing jumped 21 percent between the first and second weeks since msnNOW's launch on February 15th. That's in line with a separate report from Compete that says 23 percent of msnNOW users that didn't visit Bing in the week before launch did visit Bing after [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Microsoft: Bing | Stats: General | Stats: Popularity | Top News

The growth chart continues to trend in the right direction for DuckDuckGo. It was just about three weeks ago that we wrote about the search engine setting its own record with 731,000 searches in a single day. To go from that to more than a million in a few weeks is impressive. Via a tweet yesterday, DuckDuckGo announced that it had its first day with a million direct searches. We received over 1,000,000 direct searches yesterday for the first time ever!duckduckgo.com/traffic.html— duckduckgo (@duckduckgo) February 14, 2012 The milestone happened on February 13th when Duck [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | DuckDuckGo | Stats: Popularity

Today comScore reported January search share figures for the US market. We restrained ourselves this month, not posting on this subject before the official release, given the error that happened last time through one of the financial analyst firms and their early release of the data. Google gained share vs. last month. However, the big news is that Bing is now firmly ahead of Yahoo in "explicit core search." But using comScore's expanded "total core search" definition Yahoo remains ahead of Bing. Below are the official numbers; first explicit core search (no slideshows) and then total co [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Stats: comScore | Stats: Popularity | Top News

After 17 straight months of gains in market share, Google's Chrome web browser dropped 0.17 percent in January, and the company that tracks browser market share suggests that it's because Google penalized Chrome after a botched sponsored blog post campaign. The figures come from Net Applications, which says it tracks about 160 million unique visits per month to a worldwide network of more than 40,000 sites. According to Net Applications, Firefox and Safari also saw market share losses in January. While they were declining, Microsoft's Internet Explorer gained 1.09%, its biggest monthly g [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Chrome | Google: SEO | SEO: Spamming | Stats: Popularity | Top News

Bing is reportedly now out of betaphase in Deutschland. According to Microsoft, Bing has 10 million users or 20 percent of active internet users in Germany: Mittlerweile benutzen fast 10 Millionen Nutzer in Deutschland regelmäßig Bing, das sind 20 Prozent der aktiven Internetnutzer hierzulande. According to several third-party sources, Bing's market share is smaller than the 20 percent figure cited above. For example, the following is StatCounter's search engine data for Germany: Source: StatCounter NetMarketshare generally agrees, showing Bing's PC search share at just ove [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Google: Outside US | Microsoft: Bing Ads | Microsoft: Outside US | Microsoft: Partnerships | Stats: Popularity | Stats: Size | Yahoo: Outside US | Yahoo: Partnerships | Yahoo: Search Ads

DuckDuckGo, the upstart search engine that's challenged its bigger competitors on privacy issues, has had a couple straight days of record-setting traffic. But the numbers show just how much the major search engines dominate the search space. First, let's recognize how cool it is that DuckDuckGo actually has a public web page that shows the search engine's traffic and query activity. We learned about it via a DuckDuckGo tweet today; you can see for yourself at duckduckgo.com/traffic.html. The chart is impressive and shows the monthly moving averages of direct queries on DuckDuckGo's [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | DuckDuckGo | Stats: Popularity | Top News

A couple of Q4 2011 reports released this week from Marin Software and IgnitionOne show, among other things, the dramatic growth of mobile paid search advertising. According to the IgnitionOne document, the "mobile [paid] search ad spend is up 269% YoY and impressions are up 317%." IgnitionOne said that among its retail clients, "Mobile search [  ] accounted for 24% of retailers’ total paid search budgets on Black Friday, compared to 14.2% of the total during all of Q4. This represents enormous growth compared to Q4 2010, when mobile search spend accounted for only 5.2% of total retail p [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Mobile | Search Marketing: Mobile | Stats: Popularity | Stats: Search Behavior | Stats: Size

Last night I posted comScore December search market share numbers, based on a financial analyst report (one of several that came out yesterday or early this morning). The report incorrectly presented the search share numbers as follows. Those figures made it appear that Google had gained share at Bing's expense. It was Yahoo that lost share, however. Below are the official comScore "explicit core search" numbers, released earlier today: I was told by earlier today that the error was comScore's. However comScore says that the error came from the third party that published the numb [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Mobile | Google: Mobile | Stats: comScore | Stats: Popularity

Following the major engines themselves, Experian Hitwise announced the top search terms of 2011. The company looked at the top 1,000 search queries of 2011 and found that Facebook topped the list for the third year in a row. Overall Facebook had four of the top 10 search terms for 2011, the same as in 2010. However query volume for the collection of Facebook terms grew 33 percent vs. last year. Top search queries of 2010 and 2011 What's noteworthy is that all of the top 10 are navigational queries. Beyond the top 10, Hitwise said that "social networking-related terms dominated the [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Search & Society | Search & Society: General | Stats: Hitwise | Stats: Popularity | Top News

Bing's slow growth in US search market share continues, and Microsoft's two-and-a-half-year-old search engine is now practically neck-and-neck with Yahoo. Both, however, remain far behind Google. The latest comScore numbers show Bing increasing its market share in November to an even 15 percent, while Yahoo's dropped to 15.1 percent. Google holds 65.4 percent of the market, a small drop from October. This is comScore's "explicit" search measurement, which doesn't include things like slideshows and certain Google Instant Search queries. It also doesn't reflect mobile search queries. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Stats: comScore | Stats: Popularity | Top News

Google released the Google Zeitgeist 2011 today. Google made several lists this year and even broke them down by country. You can play with the interactive lists at googlezeitgeist.com. Those in the picture above are included in the "fastest rising searches" category, including Rebecca Black, Google+, Ryan Dunn, Casey Anthony, Battlefield 3, iPhone 5, Adele, 東京 電力, Steve Jobs and iPad 2. Google summed up the year also in this video: Here is a partial text based list: Fastest-Rising Toys 1. Lego Alien Conquest 2. Unova Pokedex 3. Fluttershy Fastest-Rising Costu [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Search | Google | Google: Trends | Google: Web Search | Search & Society: General | Stats: Popularity

SEO: one channel to rule them all? A new "merchant confidence survey" from lead-gen company MerchantCircle/Reply.com, among 2,500 US small businesses, finds that search engine optimization is the marketing channel they would choose if they could choose only one. The question asked was: "If you had to put all your marketing time and budget into only one channel, what would it be?" The list of choices included SEO, paid search, mobile, social and traditional media. As you can see below SEO beats everything else by a mile. What's also interesting is how high "traditional media" ranked. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | SEO - Search Engine Optimization | SEO: General | SEO: Local | Stats: General | Stats: Popularity | Top News

Online video viewership reached record levels in October, with YouTube passing the 20 billion views mark for the first time. That number represents a little less than 50% of all videos watched in the U.S., according to the latest statistics shared by comScore. U.S. Internet users watched an all-time high of 42.6 billion videos during October, with YouTube accounting for 20.9 billion of those views -- 49.1% of the total. ComScore credits YouTube/Google with an audience of just under 161 million unique viewers, almost triple the reach of Facebook, which was second with a little less than 60 m [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Video | Google: YouTube & Video | Stats: comScore | Stats: Popularity