The query volume for Bing-powered search engines (which includes Microsoft Bing as well as Yahoo) grew 4.3% from October to November 2010, increasing from about 4.38 million to 4.57 million, according to new data from Compete. As opposed to October 2010, when dramatic 16.2% growth in month-over-month Microsoft query volume (almost 1.9 million to 2.2 million) drove most of the Bing-powered query volume increase, Yahoo was the catalyst in November.
Yahoo’s month-over-month search query volume grew 5.7%, from 2.18 million to 2.3 million. Meanwhile, Bing’s month-over-month search query volume climbed 3%, from 2.2 million to 2.26 million.
Google experienced a slight 1.1% decrease in month-over-month search query volume, from 10.56 million to 10.44 million. Bing was not publicly available in November 2009, but Microsoft’s search query volume grew an impressive 52.1% year-over-year from 1.49 million. Yahoo saw a 15.3% increase from about 2 million, while Google lost 2.9% of its November 2009 search query volume, dropping from 10.76 million.
Bing-powered Market Share Grows 3.6%
In a month where search market share among leaders changed little, Bing-powered search engines led the way with a roughly 3.6% gain, rising from 28% to 29% market share. Fractional increases in both Yahoo and Microsoft share drove this increase. Google retained a solid market share lead with 66.4%, although this declined almost 2% from 67.6% the previous month.
Compared to November 2009, Microsoft search market share grew more than 41%, from 10.2%. Yahoo search market share increased about 7%, from 13.6%. Google lost about 9.5% of its November 2009 73.4% market share.
Microsoft Gains Visitors
Compete did not compile combined Bing-powered unique visitor totals. However, Microsoft reported 83 million unique visitors in November 2010, up 7.4% from 78 million month-over-month and 36.1% from 61 million. Yahoo reported an essentially flat unique visitor total of 85 million, while Google had 147 million unique visitors in November 2010, down 3.3% from 152 million in October 2010 and 16.7% from 176 million in November 2009.
Ask.com reported the same number of unique visitors as Microsoft in November 2010 (83 million), virtually flat from the prior month but up more than 80% from the prior year. However, these visitors only conducted 600 million queries, resulting in Ask.com’s much smaller 3.8% market share.
comScore: Microsoft Loses Some Search Gains
Microsoft sites, which have recently shown impressive month-over-month growth in core and explicit search queries, backslid a bit in November 2010, according to new comScore qSearch data. Using different metrics, comScore determined that total core searches conducted on Microsoft sites (primarily representing the Bing search engine introduced earlier this year) dropped 10% between October and November 2010, from 2.3 billion to a little more than 2 billion.
