Google Continues to Lose Search Market Share in July

For the past few months, the search market share numbers have been overshadowed by several moves from the search engines. Specifically, some types of searches were not initiated by the users, but they counted towards the market share. Now comScore has come out with numbers that take this into account and only reports the searches initiated manually by the user.

The July market share numbers for the US are now available and, despite the adjustments, show a very similar picture to the previous months. The overall trend is largely the same, Google continued to lose a little market share, Yahoo gained a tiny amount and Bing stalled.

Google went from 66.2 percent “explicit core market share” in June to 65.8 percent in the last month. Overall though, search volume was up 16.9 percent year-over-year, compared to 12.7 percent in June and to just 9.1 percent for the entire second quarter.

Explicit core market share is what comScore now calls the searches initiated by the users. comScore only looks at the queries from the top five search engines in the US, the “core” market, and then reports each site’s relative market share.

The top five search engines account for very close to 100 percent of the searches in the US. Overall, search volume was up 15.1 percent year-over-year in the last month, up from just 10.8 percent in June and 7 percent in the second quarter.

Yahoo gained some market share, even without the ‘gimmicks,’ going from 16.7 percent in June to 17.1 percent last month. Yahoo’s share went up slightly in July, year-over-year, but is still smaller than last year for the entire second quarter.

Bing didn’t move in either direction in June, with its market share flat at 11 percent. Still, it is up by 43.8 percent from last year and 42.2 percent for the quarter.