Study Reveals Search Engine Popularity by State
While a recent comScore report indicates that Bing and Yahoo are slowly chipping away at Google’s dominance of the search industry, a new study by WebpageFX tells a slightly different story.
According to the study published by WebpageFX, Google is currently capturing approximately 81% of the total search engine market in the United States, while Bing and Yahoo are accounting for about 8% each. In comparison, comScore had Google accounting for approximately 65% of the total search engine market, with Bing accounting for just under 17% and Yahoo at 12%.
Despite this wide discrepancy, the most interesting aspect of the WebpageFX study is that it drills down beyond the national level, indicating the popularity of the major three search engines state by state. A couple spoilers: California is HUGE on Google; Delaware, not so much.
The only state where Google’s search market share dips below 70% is Delaware. That’s a staggering fact on its own. In general, Google is heavily favored in the West and around New York, with California, Massachusetts, Wash. DC, Oregon and Hawaii all above 85% market share for Google. It’s telling that in Ohio, the state with the fifth-smallest market share for Google, the Big G’s piece of the pie is still just under 75%.
Yahoo
In general, WebpageFX finds that Yahoo is most popular in the South and the Rust Belt. Indeed, the states where Yahoo has the largest market share include Arkansas, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Ohio and Mississippi, with 11.69% of searches in Arkansas being conducted on Yahoo. Meanwhile, the Pacific Northwest and more central western states are almost entirely ignorant of Yahoo; Washington, Colorado, Utah and Oregon all hover between 4% and 5% market share for Yahoo.
Bing
The WebpageFX study indicates that Bing is most popular in the northern Great Plains, with the “Bingiest” state being North Dakota at 14.68% market share. Wyoming, Iowa and South Dakota aren’t far behind. Bing also has an outlier in New Mexico, where its market share of 12.22% is far higher than in neighboring states Texas, Arizona and Colorado.
The report also notes that the search engine war is expected to heat up over the summer, which is easy to believe given the resources that all three major search engines are pumping into their respective pipelines right now – Google with SEO updates, Microsoft with the relaunch of the Bing It On Challenge, and Yahoo with a series of upcoming unspecified new features for search.
