Yahoo Up, Google Down, Bing Flat: comScore

It’s that time of month. The financial analysts are publishing the comScore search market share data again, just ahead of comScore’s own press release. Last night Business Insider had the numbers up first, which I then confirmed with comScore directly.

Below are the July market share figures, as well as those for the past two months. In July Google appears to be off somewhat, while Yahoo has gained a fraction. AOL also added a tenth of a percent. Ask and Bing were flat.

The combined “search alliance” share now stands at 30.5 percent. Even though many people will try and wring some drama out of the numbers Google’s share remains stable and relatively consistent. Compare for example the data from June, 2009 the month Bing launched.

As the numbers immediately above argue, Bing’s growth has come largely at the expense of Yahoo, Ask and AOL — rather than Google.

Postscript: What the share numbers above don’t reflect is overall query volume growth. According to Citi’s Mark Mahaney, “Total Explicit Search queries” [no slideshows] in July . . . were 17.1B, up 10% Y/Y, vs. 8% Y/Y in June.” All in, including slideshows, search queries were 19.2 billion, up 15 percent year over year. Google also experienced growth in overall search volume, despite apparently losing share.