November 2013 Search Market Share Frozen, Overall Query Volume Down

It’s very cold in many parts of the US right now. And just like much of the country, the relative market share positions of the major search engines are essentially frozen. November search market share data from comScore reflects virtually no change from last month.

Google lost a fraction of a percent and Yahoo gained a miniscule tenth of a point, as did AOL. Bing and Ask.com were flat.

ComScore says that overall search query volume in November was down across the board, by a surprising 6 percent. Ask was off by 7 percent and AOL by 3 percent. Otherwise the “big three” were all off by the same 6 percent. That’s curious going into the holiday shopping season.

It may be that some of those queries migrated to mobile. The numbers above do not reflect mobile search market share.

According to StatCounter mobile now drives about 22 percent of global internet traffic and nearly 19 percent in the US. In terms of US mobile search share StatCounter offers the following breakdown:

• Google — 88.8 percent
• Yahoo — 7.7 percent
• Bing — 3.2 percent
• All others — 0.3 percent

Earlier today we reported results of a holiday shopping survey conducted by Search Engine Land and SurveyMonkey. The survey found that just over 63 percent of smartphone owners used mobile search, but 61 percent said it was “harder” than on the PC.

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+.