Every month about this time comScore releases the search engine rankings data, and I report it here. These are not the actual search engine rankings that you see when you search at a search engine, which are constantly changing. Think of this more as the “market share” for the search engine industry.
comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, has released its monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the U.S. search marketplace. Google led the explicit core search market in January with 66.2 percent of search queries conducted.
Google led the U.S. explicit core search market in January with 66.2 percent market share (up 0.3 percentage points), followed by Microsoft Sites with 15.2 percent (up 0.1 percentage points) and Yahoo! Sites with 14.1 percent. Ask Network accounted for 3.0 percent of explicit core searches, followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.6 percent.
17.8 billion explicit core searches were conducted in January, with Google Sites ranking first with 11.8 billion. Microsoft Sites ranked second with 2.7 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.5 billion, Ask Network with 527 million and AOL, Inc. with 277 million.
Google Sites accounted for 66.2 percent of total core search queries conducted (up 0.1 percentage points), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 16.0 percent and Microsoft Sites with 13.8 percent. Ask Network comprised 2.6 percent of total search queries, followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.4 percent.
* “Total Core Search” is based on the five major search engines, including partner searches, cross-channel searches and contextual searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in these numbers.