Yahoo Search continues to bleed users in January, losing 0.4 percentage points

Feb 10, 2012 15:22 GMT  ·  By

Google has gained market share for the second month in a row, while Yahoo continues to bleed. Bing has solidified its number two spot and distanced itself from Yahoo, though mostly because Yahoo is continuing to fall and not because Bing is gaining.

Google finished January with a 66.2 percent market share, as defined by comScore in its Explicit Core Search which only lists the top five search engines in the country.

That's a 0.3 percentage points growth from December, when it grew by another 0.5 percentage points. Of course, at Google's scale, the growth is not so significant.

"Google Sites led the U.S. explicit core search market in January with 66.2 percent market share (up 0.3 percentage points), followed by Microsoft Sites with 15.2 percent (up 0.1 percentage points) and Yahoo! Sites with 14.1 percent. Ask Network accounted for 3.0 percent of explicit core searches, followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.6 percent," comScore revealed.

Yahoo continued its downward spiral, it lost 0.4 percentage points in January after an equally bad December, when it lost 0.6 percentage points.

This enabled Bing to overtake Yahoo Search for the first time in the US in December. While Microsoft's search engine only gained 0.1 percentage points in January, it was enough to distance itself by 1.1 percentage points from Yahoo.

Thanks to Yahoo continuing to lose searchers, Bing-powered search has actually shrunk in the past two months, going from 30.1 percent market share in November, to 29.6 percent in December, to 29.3 percent in the first month of 2012.

While Bing may not be doing so bad, Yahoo Search shows no sign of slowing its descent. At this rate, Bing-powered search will continue to lose market share, at least in the short-term future.