Google Lose, Yahoo Gains Search Market Share in July

The July market share numbers for the US are now available byComScore and its almost similar to the previous months. The overall trend is largely the same, Google continued to lose a little market share, Yahoo gained a tiny amount and Bing stalled. Google Sites led the U.S. explicit core search market in July with 65.8 percent market share, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 17.1 percent (up 0.4 percentage points) and Microsoft sites with 11.0 percent. Ask network captured 3.8 percent of explicit core searches, followed by AOL LLC with 2.3 percent. 


Two years ago, many people expected Google to march right on up to 90% search share--and the stock price reflected this happy consensus. Now, however, it appears that Google will be lucky to cling to its mid-60% share. Yahoo clawed back half a point to 17% share still well down from a year ago and close to the lowest in the company's history. And the Microsoft Bing train stalled out at 11%.

For the past few months, the search market share numbers have been overshadowed by several moves from the search engines. Specifically, some types of searches were not initiated by the users, but they counted towards the market share. Now comScore has come out with numbers that take this into account and only reports the searches initiated manually by the user.

Explicit core market share is what comScore now calls the searches initiated by the users. comScore only looks at the queries from the top five search engines in the US, the “core” market, and then reports each site’s relative market share. The top five search engines account for very close to 100 percent of the searches in the US. Overall, search volume was up 15.1 percent year-over-year in the last month, up from just 10.8 percent in June and 7 percent in the second quarter.