Most Users Search on Yahoo and Bing as Well

Google has enjoyed a very comfortable lead in the search market for many years now and this isn't going to change anytime soon, even with the new Microsoft-Yahoo alliance. But, while market share numbers may look daunting, there are other metrics that look a lot more optimistic for the competitors. ComScore has just released new data detailing each search engine's market share but also, interestingly, the market penetration showing that, combined, Microsoft and Yahoo are used by 73 percent of the US Internet users who performed a web search in June.

“The recently announced search partnership between Microsoft and Yahoo! certainly makes the combined entity a more formidable competitor to Google in the U.S. search marketplace,” Eli Goodman, comScore search evangelist, said. “While they are still looking up at Google in terms of market share, they have a real opportunity to make headway given that nearly three-quarters of all searchers conduct at least one search on these engines every month.“

In terms of search market share, 65 percent of the searches conducted in June in the US were on Google, giving it a solid lead over the 28 percent of searches that were conducted on Bing and Yahoo combined. However, users don't necessarily use one search engine exclusively; in fact, there is quite a bit of overlap, with most people using all three major search engines.

The data shows that as much as 73.3 percent of the Internet users who performed a search in June used Bing or Yahoo Search at least one time in that month. Separately, Yahoo was used by 56.5 percent of the searchers and Bing by 41.4 percent. Google, though, still leads in this category as well, with 85 percent of the searchers using it.

The big difference in the overall share and the number of searchers using each search engine comes from the number of queries they make as Google is leading the pack, again with a comfortable lead, with users conducting on average 54.5 searches on Google but only 26.9 on Bing and Yahoo Search combined. Still, the fact that most searchers do use all of the main search engines means that all that the new Bing has to do is convince them to return more often, though that may be harder said than done.