Yahoo Loses Search Engine Market Share in September
Although official comScore data for September search market share won’t officially be released until later today, Search Engine Land already has a preview, and the results indicate that Yahoo loses search engine market share while Google managed to make some small gains and Bing held firm from August.
In regards to the other lessor know search engines, AOL experienced a tiny uptick in search engine market share, and Ask.com impressively rose nearly as much, in terms of percentage, as Google during the same time period of August through September.
Although the news is especially bad for Yahoo, it is also somewhat surprising that Microsoft’s “Bing it On Challenge” did not capture a larger overall percentage of the seach engine market share pie.
comScore Data for September vs. August
A full breakdown of monthly market share changes for the top five search engines is detailed below:
- Google: 66.7%, up 0.3% from August
- Bing: 15.9%, up 0.0% from August
- Yahoo: 12.2%, down 0.6% from August
- Ask: 3.5%, up 0.3% from August
- AOL: 1.8%, up 0.1% from August
It wasn’t that long ago that Bing and Yahoo were virtually tied for market share at around 15% apiece. Of course, any semblance of competition between the two is actually an illusion since Bing has been powering all of Yahoo’s search results for some time now. While that could certainly change in 2013 when the alliance is set to expire, there’s no question that both Bing and Yahoo will look at Google as their main competitor for the time being.
comScore Data for September 2012 vs. September 2011
A more telling picture of Google’s gains and Yahoo’s losses can be seen by looking at comScore search market share data for September of 2012 against the same data for September of last year. The breakdown looks like this:
- Google: Up 1.4% since September 2011
- Bing: Up 1.2% since September 2011
- Yahoo: Down 3.3% since September 2011
- Ask: Up 0.5% since September 2011
- AOL: Up 0.3% since September 2011
In short, all of the gains seen by Google, Bing, Ask and AOL can be traced to Yahoo’s losses. While the gains for Ask and AOL are modest in comparison to those of Google, they’re still impressive given how little market share they’re working with in the first place.
