Yahoo Loses Search Market Share for 8th Straight Month
The official comScore data regarding April 2012 search engine market share was just published and released a few days ago. One piece of information gleaned from the publication is that, as expected, Yahoo loses search market share in April.
In fact, April marks the eight consecutive month in which Yahoo has experienced a decline in search engine market share. In addition, a recent publication by Search Engine Land cites an unnamed source who believes that Yahoo’s piece of the search market will continue to shrink in the coming months, as well.
The news of Scott Thompson’s departure from Yahoo as chief operating officer probably won’t help matters either, at least not in the immediate future.
Who’s Up and Who’s Down in April Search Market Share
Yahoo experienced the largest market share drop of any major search engine in April, sinking from 13.7% to 13.5% – pretty grim considering that Yahoo was at 15.9% in April of 2011. Bing enjoyed a .1% search market share increase last month, rising from 15.3% to 15.4% and staying firmly ahead of Yahoo. Note that Bing was almost two percentage points behind Yahoo in April of 2011 with 14.1%.
Yahoo’s loss also translated into a very slight gain for Google, which jumped from 66.4% in March to 66.5% in April. Although comScore said that their data does not include mobile search, it’s been reported that Google easily dominates this category as well.
Despite predictions earlier this year that their search shares would steadily tank, Ask and AOL have remained solid through 2012 thus far. Ask has held exactly 3% of the search space this month, last month and last year, while AOL actually enjoyed a .1% bump in comparison to this month last year, rising to 1.6%. It’s hard to find anyone predicting an actual resurgence for these two sites, however, and it’s far more likely that private search engines such as DuckDuckGo will represent the largest threats to Google in the months to come.
Farewell Thompson
As mentioned, Scott Thompson has been officially ousted from his position as Yahoo CEO. Yahoo’s official press release didn’t state the specific reasoning, though it was initially assumed that a fairly major resume discrepancy (he claimed degrees in accounting and computer science, though only the former is true) was solely to blame.
We now know that Thompson’s recently revealed thyroid cancer diagnosis played into the decision as well. Former Americas region executive vice president Ross Levinsohn will take over as interim CEO.
