Google’s Grip on Global Search Share Loosens Slightly
Google is still the worldwide juggernaut when it comes to search engine market share, but a new report from Search Engine Land reminds us that there are plenty of other search providers that could be just a few ingenious ideas away from cutting into that dominance.
In fact, new data published by comScore (via GigaOm) indicates that Google may already be showing signs of slipping – albeit ever-so-slightly – in terms of searches per month relative to other search engines. In other news, Russian search engine Yandex has surpassed Microsoft’s Bing in search market share.
Slight Drops, But Still Over 65%
A whopping 175.9 billion global search commands were conducted worldwide in December, and 114.7 billion of those searches were conducted on Google. This comes to 65.2% of overall market share, the same figure Google posted in November. Nothing to scoff at, by any means, but if you’re a Google exec, you’re not pleased to know that that figure stood at 66.6% just back in July of 2012. Google actually dropped to 65.2% in August (when monthly searches fell off by over seven billion) and gained some ground back in subsequent months, but that ground has been lost as of the end of 2012.
Google’s market share grip loosened even more significantly when counting unique searchers as opposed to total searches. A staggering 82.2% of searchers used Google in July 2012, compared to just 76.6% in December 2012.
Microsoft is #5
Remember, we’re talking about worldwide search market share, so there are more players than your standard-issue Google, Bing and Yahoo – and this is spelling trouble for Microsoft. Back in July, about 4.57 billion searches were conducted on Microsoft search engines, while about 3.5 billion were conducted on Russian search engine Yandex. Fast forward to December, and those figures were at 4.47 billion for Microsoft and 4.844 billion for Yandex.
Although the real story is that Yandex has experienced huge growth, and not that Microsoft has given up a glut of users, most news headlines are focusing on the fact that Microsoft is now #5 in search share globally, behind Google, China’s Baidu, Yahoo and Yandex.
