Yahoo Search Continues to Lose Market Share

The search market is moving along, following the trend of the recent months, and it's likely to be that way for the coming months as well, at least until the deal between Yahoo and Microsoft starts getting some real traction. Google continues its slow upwards crawl, Yahoo loses even more market share and Bing sees a small uptick, as usual for the last half of 2009.

The comScore numbers for November show Microsoft's Bing going over the 10 percent milestone to get a 10.3 percent market share in the US, for the first time in quite a while, and showing that the new search engine can be considered a success by some standards. Bing is up from 9.9 percent in October and from 8 percent in May, the month before Bing's arrival onto the scene. Microsoft's Live Search, Bing's precursor, had 8.3 percent market share in November 2008.

Yahoo dropped for another month and by a huge margin as well, managing to attract just 17.5 percent of the searches in the US in November, a full 0.5 percentage points lower than October's 18 percent. The search engine, which has taken the back seat in Yahoo's corporate strategy, has seen better days managing to get 20.1 percent of the market in May and 20.4 percent a year ago.

Google, in the mean time, is not only not feeling the 'pressure,' it's actually gaining market share as well. The search giant got 65.6 percent of the market in November, a small increase from October's 65.4 percent but an increase nonetheless. In May it had 65 percent and 63.5 percent last year in November. Ask.com dropped from 3.9 percent in October to 3.8 percent and AOL also dropped from 2.9 percent to 2.8 percent. The numbers represent the percentage of core search market share, meaning that just the top 5 search engines are counted. Other analytics firms have some pretty different numbers for the same period.