comScore released its October 2009 search share numbers and Google has passed 65% search market share, holding 65.4% share in October, up 0.5% from the previous month. comScore also claims that Microsoft Bing also gained 0.5% share, reaching 9.9%, while Yahoo dropped 0.8% to 18.0% from the previous month.

Nielsen also released its October 2009 stats, showing Google has a 66.1% share, Yahoo has a 15.4% and Microsoft Bing has a 9.7% share. I was unable to find Nielsen’s September report (did they publish one?) but I did find their August report which showed Bing had 10.7% share. In this case, Bing actually decreased in share by 1%, according to Nielsen.

As we always say, looking at these search share reports month-to-month is not always a good indication of the competitive landscape. I am sure Danny will be publishing a more comprehensive report, aggregating all this data, and fleshing out the true look at growth and decline amongst the various search engines.

We received some interesting data from search agency iCrossing yesterday. The data show US search market share percentages and distribution quite different than the major traffic metrics firms. The company says its numbers are “based on a large representative sample of Fortune 1000 companies, across all major verticals,” which use its search tracking tools.

Accordingly the iCrossing data show US September natural search market share to be the following:

• Google 76.7 percent
• Bing (increasingly slightly from Aug to) 8.2 percent
• Yahoo (decreasing to) 11.1 percent
• AOL and Ask show “precipitous declines”

This is how iCrossing characterized the data in an email to me: “it represents actual traffic received from engines, as picked up by our own analytics tracking across enterprise level sites, as opposed to all traffic on the Web.”

Compare comScore data for September:

Compare Hitwise:

The Bing numbers are relatively close in the data above but iCrossing shows Yahoo with a significantly smaller share than either comScore or Hitwise. And while those services both seem to show a stable core of usage for Ask and AOL search, iCrossing reflects losses for those engines.

Here are some visual representations of the iCrossing numbers:

According to the latest comScore survey, Google’s search market share climbed to just under 65% last month, and remains more than triple that of Yahoo, the second-place search engine.

ComScore pegs Google with 64.9% of all searches conducted during September 2009, up from 64.6% in August. Yahoo dropped from August’s 19.3% to 18.8% in September. And Bing, in third place, showed minor growth from 9.3% to 9.4%.

Despite Google’s small gains in market share, comScore says Google saw a slight drop in the number of searches — but that could be due to September having one less day than August.

Years ago, McDonald’s restaurants advertised how many burgers they had served right on the big sign at each location. And when it got too many to count, the signs changed to simply say, “Billions and billions served.” YouTube is quickly reaching that same tipping point for online video views.

According to comScore, Google/YouTube served up more than 10 billion video views in August — the first time any video site has surpassed the 10 billion mark. Other firsts during the month of August? Online users watched more than 25 billion videos overall, an all-time high. And 161 million U.S. Internet users watched video online in August, the biggest monthly total ever.

Surprising no one, Google/YouTube continues to be the dominant video provider according to comScore’s numbers, showing just under 40% of all videos watched online during August.

No one reading Search Engine Land should be surprised to hear stories about Google’s dominance of the search landscape. But the degree to which Google dominates in some areas is sure to make you raise an eyebrow.

Consider India and Brazil, two growing Internet markets. ComScore released some stunning numbers about what’s happening in those two countries and how Google owns a lot of the online experience there.

In Brazil, for example, about 30% of a person’s online time is spent on a Google property. In India, it’s about 29% of online time. For perspective, comScore says that the worldwide average amount of time spent on Google properties is 9.4%.

Google accounts for almost 90% of searches conducted in Brazil, and 88% in India, comScore says. But it’s not just Google’s search engine powering this dominance. Consider these numbers:

India

• Social networking: Google’s Orkut gets 68% of time spent in this category
• Multimedia: YouTube gets 83% of time spent
• Maps: Google Maps has 64% of time spent

Brazil

• Social networking: Orkut gets 96% of time spent
• Multimedia: YouTube gets 92% of time spent
• Maps: Google Maps gets 71% of time spent

ComScore suggests that Google’s dominance in these two countries is because their emergence on the world scene coincided with Google’s rise online. Perhaps. But one thing’s for sure: It’s Google’s world, and we’re all just living in it.

Search activity around the world jumped 41 percent between July 2008 and July 2009, and Google remains the most popular search engine with 67.5% global market share. Those are some of the stats that comScore shared today about the global search market.

According to comScore, Google is not only No. 1 around the world, but it also continues to gain market share — rising 58% between July 2008 and July 2009. Yahoo is second in overall market share, but its growth is stagnant at just 2% in the same period. Chinese search engine Baidu is third overall, but Microsoft/Bing may eventually surpass it; the latter has seen a 41% increase in searches, while Baidu only grew by 8%.

It’s interesting to see that Ask Network saw almost as much growth (39%) as Microsoft sites. Among the top ten search properties worldwide, comScore says none is growing faster than Russia’s Yandex, which saw a 94% gain in searches over the past year.

The comScore release also includes some interesting stats comparing different world regions. comScore says Europe as a whole does the most searching, with 32.1% of all worldwide search activity. Asia Pacific is second with 30.8% and North America third with only 22.1% of all searches.

On an annual basis the University of Michigan puts out the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) E-Business report, sponsored and administered by Foresee Results. Among the things the index examines is consumer satisfaction with search engines.

The survey asks a representative sample of consumers to rate their experiences with portals and search engines according to several criteria, which produces an overall score on a 100 point scale. Google is again on top in search with a score of 86, identical to last year. The survey is supposed to be predictive of future consumer behavior, as the associated report argues:

[The ACSI] is a predictor of future success on both the micro and macro level. Google’s huge 10 point jump in satisfaction from 2007 to 2008 preceded a 7% increase in search market share from 2008 to 2009. Satisfaction with Yahoo, on the other hand, dropped 2.5% from 2007 to 2008, preceding a 17.5% decrease in search market share and a 5% drop in portal market share.

When the 2007 results saw Yahoo jump ahead of Google for the first time since the inception of the e-business survey I asked about this asserted relationship between the survey and market share:

The satisfaction data clearly don’t correlate with search market share. I asked [Foresee Results CEO Larry] Freed in this context why people should care and pay attention to the ACSI. Freed was confident that “search market share reflects past behavior. But the ACSI is predictive of future consumer behavior.” He said that historically it has been a very accurate gauge of future consumer behavior in other industries. He added that Google’s decline was a second dip in a row after a smaller decline last year.

Considered over the course of almost a decade of satisfaction rankings, the survey results would indeed appear predictive of market share (for Google), though the 2007 satisfaction win did not correctly predict corresponding market-share gains for Yahoo in 2007-2008.

Source: ACSI/Foresee Results (2009)

According to the survey, conducted before Bing, Google has a significant lead over its competitors, which has widened since 2007.

These overall results line up with a recent search loyalty report from comScore showing Google users as the most loyal.

It’s somewhat disappointing that we’ll have to wait an entire year to see what the ACSI has to say about Bing, because it would give us another opportunity to test the accuracy of the index as a predictor of future behavior.

According to comScore Bing now has an 8.9 percent share of the search market, up from 8 percent in May, before the launch. A year from now, when the next report comes out, we’ll know generally whether Bing is a success. For now, here’s what the ACSI report commentary has to say about Bing and its prospects:

[I]t seems unlikely that customers will actually leave Google in enough numbers to allow Bing to seriously challenge Google’s market dominance, given Google’s extremely high customer satisfaction. People are happy with Google, so why would they switch? They might switch if Bing is better, and that’s a tall order considering Google is the second- highest scoring ACSI service-sector company, behind Newegg.com. Bing has been called a search engine war “game changer,” but Google’s game will be very hard to change at this point. If anyone can do it, it’s the combined resources and market share of Yahoo and MSN.

The central “takeaway” from the report would seem to be that it’s not simply “habit” driving Google usage — people are actually “satisfied.”

A report analyzing traffic and click-through rates from ad network Chikita finds that “Bing users are over 50% more likely to click an ad on your site than Google users.” What this means, according to the post, is those who arrive at third party sites via Bing click more frequently on ads on those sites than those coming through Google. TechCrunch offers a bit more detail and speculation about why this might be (i.e., “the law of large numbers”). According to Chikita, the respective click rates are:

• Google: .97 percent
• Yahoo: 1.24 percent
• Bing: 1.5 percent

Bing appears has made some incremental gains in search market share since its launch at the end of May. The two most recent roundups of the numbers are here and here. Even though Bing has been well received and has some momentum it doesn’t appear that will quickly translate into significant market share advances. For that reason Microsoft still needs Yahoo’s reach.

Turning to the seemingly perpetual subject of a search deal between Microsoft and Yahoo, AdAge is reporting that a deal, previously described as “imminent,” could be announced this week. The article says the payment structure was a sticking point and will be a revenue share rather than an upfront payment and revenue guarantees, which Yahoo had reportedly wanted:

Execs in Redmond never conceived of the deal as an upfront purchase of Yahoo’s search traffic but as a deal in which Yahoo would be compensated from a share of revenue from the sale of search ads. Yahoo would be allowed to sell search ads on Bing.com as well as its own site, giving it more search inventory to sell and making it a bigger player in the search sales front. It would also immediately be able to save millions by not having to maintain its own search infrastructure.

The latest terms of the deal underscore Microsoft’s devotion to developing and owning technology vs. selling media. The deal won’t make it a bigger seller of online advertising but it would allow it to eliminate a search-technology competitor in Yahoo and consolidate roughly 30% of the search marketplace on its own platform — a large enough share, CEO Steve Ballmer seems to believe, to dent Google’s dominance.

If the article is correct then Yahoo would retain the ability to sell search and display to its advertisers, but probably not through an integrated platform. Currently Yahoo sells search via Panama and display advertising through APT; however there was always discussion of integrating the platforms in the near term.

We’ll have to wait to see whether there’s a deal and what the terms are. Any such deal would have to pass muster with regulators before it could be implemented.

On that front, the NY Times ran an article this weekend describing internal conflict within the Obama administration about how aggressive to get with anti-trust policy and prosecutions. The US Department of Justice anti-trust chief Christine Varney, who has described Google previously as “a monopoly,” is apparently facing push-back in her quest to reign in some US corporations. How this internal debate plays out will affect scrutiny of potential deals such as Yahoo-Microsoft.

Now a third major ratings service has released search engine share figures for June 2009, and like the others, they show that Bing made only a tiny gain in the wake of its launch and major ad campaign.

The comScore figures have gone out to the financial analyst community, and the comScore press release with them usually arrives a week after that. But Mark Mahaney at Citigroup gave permission to cite figures in his report, which includes analysis for investors (too early to call, Bing has a “solid product” but faces “large uphill battle”).

For June 2009, here’s the search share handled by each of the major players in the United States:

• Google: 65.0%, unchanged from May 2009
• Yahoo: 19.6%, down from 20.1%, a 0.5% drop
• Bing: 8.4%, up from 8.0%, a 0.4% rise
• Ask: 3.9%, unchanged from May 2009
• AOL: 3.1%, unchanged from May 209

In terms of search volume, actual number of searches handled:

• Google: 9.135 billion, down from 9.307 billion, a 172 million search drop
• Yahoo: 2.755 billion, down from 2.877 billion, a 122 million search drop
• Bing: 1.179 billion, up from 1.149 billion, a 30 million rise
• Ask: 552 million, down from 555 million, a 3 million drop
• AOL: 439 million, down form 438 million, a 1 million drop

The volume figures are important. With Bing showing a 0.4% rise in share, while Yahoo shows a 0.5% drop, it’s easy to assume that Bing “stole” share from Yahoo. However, what happens each month is that the overall “pie” of searches gets larger or smaller in general. In the summer, the pie often shrinks as people are out of school and not searching as much.

So Yahoo’s drop? The 122 million searches that it lost didn’t all flow into Bing, which shows a 30 million rise. Of course, normally you’d also have expected Bing to also have shown a summer drop. That’s also important to consider, in fully measuring the gain. For example, if it had normally fallen by 50 million searches, then to show a 30 million rise would mean in reality an 80 million overall gain.

Aren’t interpreting stats fun? Suffice to say, Bing did well to be up, but it’s uncertain who they pulled away from (especially since the Bing marketing and publicity might have generated “new” searches that wouldn’t normally have existed), and we remain very much in watch and see mode.

For those keeping score at home, here’s how it looks with the other rating services, on a share and gain basis, with June 2009 cited first, then May 2009 and the change:

• comScore: 8.4%, up from 8.0%, a 0.4% rise
• Compete: 6.2%, up from 6.5%, a tiny 0.3% gain
• Hitwise: 5.25%, down from 5.64, a .039% drop

On a weekly basis, Hitwise found a rise from the beginning of the month in June to the end of the month. More on that in the related stories below:

• Bing: comScore sees Gains; Compete Sees Same Old, Same Old (early June 2009 figures)
• Hitwise: Bing Both Grows & Drops In June; Google Still Tops (full June 2009 figures)
• At One Month, Bing Says Unique Users Up; Compete Says Barely Any Gain In Searches (full June 2009 figures)
• Report: Search Ad Spending Stabilizes While Bing Gains On Google, Yahoo
• Report: Google Has Nothing To Fear From Bing Itself (interesting consumer behavior survey from JP Morgan)

For those who want an early peak into July, here’s the past five days of share data from Compete:

Bing figures don’t include searches at Club Bing, which add about another 1.5% or so share, roughly. Bing started June in the 5.5% to 6.0% range, so it’s picked up about 1% share according to Compete, since June.

As I keep saying, while there’s a temptation to draw conclusions from the early figures, we really want to see what happens around October and November. People will be back from school then, the months will be more “regular” in nature and the Bing marketing campaign will likely have ended or ramped down. Will word-of-mouth have spread by then? Will behaviors have changed?

More early stats are coming in on how searchers are reacting to the Bing launch. comScore shows Microsoft’s Bing search engine continuing to make gains, but Compete shows things remain largely the same.

From comScore, the latest stats show that “searcher penetration” has climbed from 13.7% in the week before it launched, to 15.8% during the launch week to 16.7% for the week after launch. The share of search results pages have risen from 9.1% to 12.1% over the same period. From the comScore press release:

Searcher Penetration & Share Of Search Results Pages shouldn’t be confused with the standard “search share” figures that comScore or other ratings services typically release. As I wrote earlier when these figures first came out:

I’ve talked with comScore a bit more about the figures. They’re not providing an early look at the usual “share of searches” figure that’s released on a monthly basis, as this is something they want clients to have a first look at.

The “Share Of Search Results Pages” figure above runs closely akin to that, they say – so Microsoft’s Bing might have picked up 2% share of the searches “pie.” However, keep in mind that if the pie itself gets larger because of new searches, other players can lose share even if the overall raw number of searches increases.

To me, the more interesting figure is the “Searcher Penetration,” which shows of everyone searching on the web, what percentage at some point made it to a particular search engine on a daily basis. Microsoft managed to get 15.5% of searchers over to check it out, up from 13.8% the week before – a 1.7% gain. comScore tells me that Google and Yahoo also had penetration gains, but that Microsoft’s gain was on the order of double of the others.

And how could everyone gain? Penetration for any particular search engine can be up to 100%, as people use more than one search engine. So (purely for example) Google could have a 80% penetration, Yahoo 60% and Microsoft 30% — which would show most people use Google, but plenty also use Yahoo and some use also Microsoft.

Meanwhile, Compete has also sent me stats. Below, “Search Engine Users Share,” the percentage of all searchers in the United States who went to one or more of the services below (since they could go to more than one, the overall percentages add to more than 100%):

The bold line marks the Bing launch, and you can see Microsoft immediately gains 3% — but this doesn’t come at the expense of the other search engines. People were checking out Bing in addition to visiting their regular services. Since the launch, Bing’s had a high of 12.1% share (also in bold) but mainly hovers at the 11% mark.

Unlike comScore, Compete has release standard share of searches figures. These are below. The show what percentage of searches are handled by each of the major search engines. While people may search at more than one search engine, the overall “pie” of searches that happen on a given day is finite — so the percentages do not add up to more than 100%. Bold marks the launch day for Bing (figures before that reflect searches at MSN and Windows Live):

As you can see, Compete’s figures show that the launch has created no gain in search share. Compete has some additional charts through June 8 here.

Over at Hitwise, there aren’t share figures in terms of search, but you can see how Bing is now among the top 20 most popular web sites in the US and is considered the 4th most popular search engine. Of course, I think Live Search (which Bing replaced) was also among the most popular sites — and I’m pretty sure it was the 3rd most popular search engine. So the changes don’t mean that much when you know the context. And does that mean Bing is less popular than Live Search? Almost certainly not. I suspect there’s still a lot of data consolidation that has yet to happen with the Hitwise figures.

Meanwhile, Efficient Frontier — which handles paid search campaigns for many large companies — found a 19.8% lift in impressions for Bing. That’s not a 19.8% share. That’s the difference between the percentage who visited Bing before the launch compared to afterward. What the actual impression share was isn’t given.

These figures are all prelminary, and while we’re all anxious to know how things are going, it’s going to take months to really assess the situation.

The first true benchmark will be the more standard figures for June and especially the months after that. A rise in June wouldn’t be surprising, given the amount of marketing that’s going on. But when the marketing levels off or decreases in the following months, will it have done the job to keep searchers.

But before we get June, May figures are coming in. From Nielsen (PDF), the share of searches handled in the US by the major three players:

• Google: 63.2%
• Yahoo: 17.2%
• Microsoft: 9.4%

As for comScore, financial analysts get stats before the general press, and sometimes those leak out. For May, Business Insider has figures from comScore that JP Morgan’s Imran Khan put out:

• Google: 65.0%
• Yahoo: 20.1%
• Microsoft: 8.0%

For a long term view of search share, see my Search Market Share 2008: Google Grew, Yahoo & Microsoft Dropped & Stabilized post. Also see related discussion on Techmeme.