Google Owned Two-Thirds of the Search Market in May 2012

Jason Hahn | DM Confidential | June 20, 2012

According to comScore, Google expanded its U.S. search kingdom to claim 2 out of every 3 search queries in May.

In May, Google Sites owned 66.7 percent of the U.S. explicit core search market, up 0.2 percentage points from its 66.5 percent share in April.

Microsoft Sites followed with 15.4 percent of the market, unchanged from its slice of the pie in April. Meanwhile, Yahoo finished May with 13.4 percent of the U.S. search market, down 0.1 percentage point from its 13.5 percent share in April.

Ask Network had 3.0 percent of the market in May, unchanged from its mark in April, while AOL Inc. claimed 1.5 percent of the market, down 0.1 percentage point.

“’Explicit Core Search’ excludes contextually driven searches that do not reflect specific user intent to interact with the search results,” according to comScore.

In May, 17.5 billion explicit core searches were conducted, up 2 percent from the 17.1 billion queries conducted in the previous month. Of this total, Google claimed 11.7 billion queries, up 3 percent. Microsoft Sites claimed 2.7 billion queries, up 2 percent from April, while Yahoo claimed 2.3 billion queries, up 1 percent month-over-month.

Ask Network handled 521 million queries in May, up 2 percent. AOL Inc. handled 268 million queries in May, down 1 percent from its load in April, according to comScore.

The monthly search report also noted that 68.9 percent of searches in May carried organic results from Google, up 0.2 percentage points from April. Meanwhile, 25.6 percent of searches carried results from Bing.

Separate numbers from Experian Hitwise revealed the top five Google search terms for the four rolling weeks ending June 9:

1. “facebook” (3.66 percent of searches; 81.95 percent success rate)
2. “youtube” (1.01 percent of searches; 92.65 percent success rate)
3. “yahoo” (0.65 percent of searches; 86.29 percent success rate)
4. “yahoo mail” (0.59 percent of searches; 80.35 percent success rate)
5. “craigslist” (0.45 percent of searches; 89.16 percent success rate)

Hitwise also listed the top five websites visited after search engines for the week ending June 9:

1. Facebook (6.44 percent of clicks)
2. YouTube (3.79 percent of clicks)
3. Gmail (2.25 percent of clicks)
4. Wikipedia (1.28 percent of clicks)
5. Yahoo Mail (1.08 percent of clicks)

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