Google Search Share Falls As Yahoo, Bing Grows

Clint Boulton eWEEK USA 2012. Ziff Davis Enterprise Inc. All Rights Reserved,

Google’s search share has fallen below 65 percent, on the back of increases from Yahoo and Bing

New figures out from comScore have revealed that in August, Google’s US search engine market share dipped to 64.8 percent from 65.1 percent in July.

The number two search-engine provider Yahoo rose a tick to 16.3 percent from 16.1 percent in July, while its partner Microsoft Bing gained the most, growing from 14.4 percent to 14.7 percent in the period.

By the end of 2011, Bing could double the 8 percent market share it launched with in June 2009.

Yahoo Stabilises

Many analysts expect Yahoo to haemorrhage market share after agreeing to let Bing power its search results for a decade.

While the search engine’s share has dropped significantly over the last two years, it seems to have stabilised, perhaps showing the venerable property’s loyal user base.

Google’s drop is as big as Bing’s approach to 15 percent because it marks the first time that the leading search engine has fallen below the 65 percent mark since September 2009.

At just under 65 percent, Google has little reason to panic. Yet the company’s search engineers can’t be pleased. Google employs several hundred software engineers to keep the search engine running in top shape.

The massive team would love to get back to its May 2010 status of 66.4 percent share, the company’s highest mark ever, according to comScore.

Chrome Advantage?

The company in June launched Instant Pages to cut query retrieval times by a couple seconds per query, and added its voice search technology from the desktop.

Both features are available for Google’s Chrome web browser, potentially offering the company a competitive advantage that Bing and Yahoo lack.

More broadly, Google’s search drop came as US explicit core searches, or those without slide shows and contextual queries, rose 9.1 percent from this time last year. ComScore said the vast majority of the volume growth was driven by Google and Bing’s explicit Core search query volume growth.