The search market data for April for the US is out and it paints a familiar picture. Both Google and Yahoo lost a bit of market share, while Bing continued its slow ascent. Google still has a very solid advantage and dominates with 65.4 percent of the market share. However, April was the first month that Microsoft's Bing inched past the 14 percent mark. Bing and Yahoo Search, which is powered by Bing in the US, remained flat at 30 percent market share.
"Google Sites led the U.S. explicit core search market in April with 65.4 percent market share, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 15.9 percent (up 0.2 percentage points) and Microsoft Sites with 14.1 percent (up 0.2 percentage points). Ask Network accounted for 3.0 percent of explicit core searches, followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.5 percent," the analytics firm comScore reported.
These are the numbers for what comScore calls Explicit Core Search, meaning searches initiated by the users themselves and not done automatically.
This excludes things like slideshow searches on both Bing and other Microsoft sites and Yahoo.
For certain news items and articles, both Microsoft and Yahoo have started including slideshow searches, image searches that may be related to the topic but which were not explicitly initiated by the reader.
Explicit Core Search numbers also take into account technologies like Google Instant, which loads a set of search results for partial queries as the user types.
Starting this month, the numbers also factors in the new Yahoo Search Direct feature which is similar in some ways to Google Instant and also loads search results as well as direct answers, as soon as the users start typing.
"Google Sites accounted for 64.2 percent of total core search queries conducted (up 0.1 percentage points), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 17.9 percent and Microsoft Sites with 13.8 percent (up 0.2 percentage points)," comScore revealed the numbers for Total Core Search, which include slideshow searches and other data sources.
Find us on Google+
