Search Market Share Remains Stagnant from May to June
Most months, all the major search engines trade at least a few percentage points of market share, but from May to June of this year, all of the Big 3 (Google, Yahoo and Bing) and even the lesser-remembered two (AOL and Ask.com) remained essentially stagnant.
Bigger news this month, in terms of search trends, according to a recently published comScore report, was the fact that desktop search activity (in other words, not from a tablet or smartphone device) increased yet again – surprising news given the increasing popularity of mobile devices and waning sales of PCs.
Who’s Up, Who’s Down
The search market share breakdown for June 2013 looks like this:
- Google: 66.7% (exactly as it was in May)
- Ask.com: 2.7% (again, same as last month)
- AOL: 1.3% (once again… precisely the figure for May)
- Bing: 17.9% (up 0.5% from May)
- Yahoo: 11.4% (down 0.5% from May)
Despite the fact that Bing gained half a percentage point in market share and Yahoo lost the same, the comScore report could easily be interpreted as total stagnation because Yahoo and Bing, who are in a mutually beneficial search partnership, essentially just traded search traffic.
Desktop Search Activity Way Up from 2012
Perhaps the bigger story was the increase in desktop search activity since this month last year. Although activity dropped off by 4% from May of 2013, it was up 12% from June of 2012. Most of the increases in desktop search activity are happening on Bing and Google, with gains of 28% and 12% respectively from this time last year.
The message behind this? Make sure you’re catering to mobile customers, but don’t be fooled into thinking that devices with 13″+ displays are going the way of the dodo either.
