Market Share: Bing Continues Gains, Yahoo “Stabilized,” Google Flat

Financial analysts are releasing May comScore search market share data to their clients, which means we’re getting an early look at what the metrics firm will be generally exposing in the next 24 hours.

Here are the numbers — comparing April and May of 2013 as well as May 2012:

• Google: 66.7 percent (May) vs. 66.5 percent (April) vs. 66.7 percent (May 2012)
• Bing: 17.4 percent (May) vs. 17.3 percent (April) vs. 15.4 percent (May 2012)
• Yahoo: 11.9 percent (May) vs. 12 percent (April) vs. 13.4 percent (May 2012)
• Ask: Google: 2.7 percent (May) vs. 2.7 percent (April) vs. 3 percent (May 2012)
• AOL: 1.3 percent (May) vs. 1.4 percent (April) vs. 1.5 percent (May 2012)

Google is flat year-over-year. Yahoo appears to have stabilized, and Bing continues to make incremental gains, partly at Yahoo’s expense. Ask and AOL also continue to lose share as part of a long term trend. However, Ask’s search share is more than double AOL’s at this point.

None of this includes mobile search queries. In many categories, mobile is 20 percent to 40 percent (or more) of the overall search query volume.

Below are StatCounter data about mobile search market share in the US:

Interestingly, Google’s mobile search share has slowly declined from a high of about 95 percent — and Yahoo’s has been growing. Google now captures 84 percent of mobile search query volume on the mobile Web. Yahoo has 11 percent and Bing has just under 5 percent.

While Yahoo may not be able to regain lost query volume on the PC, it does appear to have an opportunity to develop further search momentum in mobile.

Postscript: The official comScore release has just come out confirming the market-share numbers reported above.

About The Author

Greg Sterling

Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog, Screenwerk, about connecting the dots between digital media and real-world consumer behavior. He is also VP of Strategy and Insights for the Local Search Association. Follow him on Twitter or find him at Google+.