Search Rankings See Little Movement, ComScore Says

Search engine rankings in the United States remained remarkably stable in the month of June, according to comScore.

ComScore released its monthly search metrics 13 July, showing that Google’s and Yahoo’s share remained the same from May at 65.5 percent and 15.9 percent, respectively.

Microsoft’s Bing search service rose from 14.1 percent to 14.4 percent. Without a full percentage point change here, it’s fair to rate Bing’s growth as flat, too.

Google Domination

ComScore said Google took 10.9 billion of the 16.7 billion explicit core searches, or those that exclude slideshows and contextual links in text, lodged in June. Yahoo followed with 2.7 billion queries, and Microsoft notched 2.4 billion searches.

Jefferies & Company analyst Youssef Squali said explicit core searches were up 8.8 percent year-over-year for the second quarter, thanks to boosts in Google’s and Bing’s explicit core search query volume.

However, Google’s query volume dragged to 6.4 percent year-over-year growth compared with 9.8 percent for May and 6.5 percent through April.

For Q2 2011, Google grew queries only 7.5 percent, a quarter-over-quarter slowdown from the 9.7 percent the search giant tallied in the first quarter.

Perhaps a little surprising about Google’s lack of growth in June is that Google had a busy month for search. The company launched Google voice and image search on the desktop, as well as Instant Pages to speed up results rendering to the company’s 1 billion-plus search users.

Social Move

When Google first launched Google Instant in September 2010, it quickly saw query growth and search gains in the following months, but that wore off.

What will be interesting to watch going forward is whether the new Google+ social network boosts searches through July and beyond.

Google+ is in limited beta now, but appears to have millions of users engaging on the site, which includes Circles social provisioning, Sparks news topics and Hangouts for group video chat.

On the downside, Google is facing serious regulatory pressure in the US, with the Federal Trade Commission launching a broad antitrust inquiry into the company’s search practices, mirroring a European Commission.

The Justice Department is also mulling whether or not the company’s $400 million (£248m) play for AdMeld is good for competition.