Although overall search query volume dropped 6.2% in February 2010, the 10% drop in February’s number of days implies growth, according to data from compete.
Major Search Engines Continue Market Share Trend
The major online search engines continued their established market share trend in February 2010. Google retained its solid number one ranking with a 71% market share, up slightly from 70.4% in January 2010.
Number two search engine Yahoo lost one percentage point of market share last month, dropping from 16.9% to 15.9%. Number three Microsoft gained half a percentage point, improving its market share from 9.8% to 10.2%. Ask.com and AOL rounded out the top five with single-digit market share results.
On the web search-only side of things, results were similar, with Google commanding an even higher 74.5% of market share. Number three Microsoft also held a higher percentage of web search-only market share (10.6%), with number two Yahoo losing ground (12.4%). Number four Ask.com had slightly better share performance in this market and AOL had slightly worse share performance.
Query Volume Drops
Measuring the month-over-month volume of both overall search queries and web-only search queries, and all of the top five online search engines show decline, even those that increased their market share.
Of the top three engines, Microsoft’s query volume shrank the least percentagewise, dropping 2% overall, from 1.61 billion to 1.58 billion, while its web query volume shrank 0.4%, from 1.409 billion to 1.408 billion.
Meanwhile, Google’s overall query volume dropped 5.7%, from 11.6 billion to 10.9 billion, and its web query volume also shrank 5.7%, from 10.54 billion to 9.94 billion. Yahoo’s overall query volume dropped 12.1%, from 2.78 billion to 2.44 billion, and its web query volume dropped 13.6%, from 1.9 billion to 1.65 billion.
Nielsen, comScore Show Similar Results
February 2010 online search rankings from The Nielsen Company and comScore generally show similar results to compete’s findings, with Google holding a dominant lead, followed by Yahoo and Microsoft (primarily represented by the Bing search engine). However, Nielsen and comScore differ significantly in how they track Bing’s monthly growth.
MSN/WindowsLive/Bing experienced approximately 15% growth in its share of US searches in February 2010, according to Nielsen; while Microsoft Search (primarily represented by Bing, as is MSN/WindowsLive/Bing), only registered 0.2-percentage-point search market share growth in January, according to comScore qSearch data.