Google's Search Share Declines, but It's Still in a Comfortable Position

As has been the case for quite a while now, the search market is rather stable, in terms of market share and Google, while not gaining anything for the past year or more isn't loosing much share either.

All the while, the search market is growing overall, so Google, along with everyone else, is seeing more search traffic each month across its sites.

Bing-powered search, i.e. Bing and Yahoo, have been making some progress since Yahoo switched to Bing results, a year ago, but it's not exactly groundbreaking.

According to comScore numbers, Bing and Yahoo managed to gain 2.5 percent points market share in the last year, going from 28.5 percent combined to 31 percent.

Other analytics companies though give Bing and Yahoo a bigger stake of the search market and show a 4 percent points rise in the past year.

"Google Sites led the U.S. explicit core search market in August with 64.8 percent market share, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 16.3 percent (up 0.2 percentage points) and Microsoft Sites with 14.7 percent (up 0.3 percentage points)," comScore reports.

"Ask Network accounted for 3.0 percent of explicit core searches (up 0.1 percentage points), followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.3 percent," it added.

While there are some changes, they're too small to count, overall. While Bing may be adding a few percentage points to its market share, it's not getting close to Google any time soon.

But it may be enough, the search market is expanding overall, so Microsoft should be making more money each quarter, even if it doesn't gain any market share. That said, Microsoft has been losing money with Bing and most of its other online services for years and doesn't expect to start turning a profit soon.