September Search Market: Flat As A Pancake

The September search market share data from comScore got pushed out earlier this evening by financial analysts. As always, these numbers aren’t official until comScore releases them tomorrow.

Here are the figures as we received them:

• Google — September: 66.9 percent; August: 66.9 percent
• Bing — September: 18 percent; August: 17.8 percent
• Yahoo — September: 11.3 percent; August: 11.4 percent
• Ask — September:  2.5 percent; August: 2.6 percent
• AOL — September:  1.3 percent; August: 1.3 percent

Compared with last month the market is pretty flat. Bing took a fraction of a point from Yahoo and Ask. Once again the combined share of Bing + Yahoo has not changed. It has been essentially static for the entire duration of the partnership, though Bing and Yahoo have been moving in opposite directions.

Tomorrow Yahoo announces quarterly earnings. We’ll see if there has been growth in search revenue despite the company’s continuing loss of market share.

As we vicariously understand it, comScore continues to report growth in PC search query volume. The firm said that core search has seen seven months of double-digit year over year growth. This is happening despite migration of users to mobile devices.

This continuing growth in PC query volume, for the seventh straight month, is the most interesting part of the comScore data. We’ve requested some insight from comScore regarding what may account for the sustained increases and will amend this post if we receive any response.

The figures above don’t reflect mobile search volumes. Currently, according to StatCounter mobile traffic in the US represents nearly 18 percent of the total. In local categories the figures are higher. Local publishers say that between 35 percent and 50+ percent of their queries are now coming from mobile.

Postscript: The official comScore data are now out, confirming the market share figures above. However comScore doesn’t confirm the growth of core search volumes that was reported in the financial analyst docs. In fact, it reflects that search volumes are down across the board vs. last month.

This is what we would expect given the rise of mobile devices and usage as we discussed above.