14 DAY TRIAL // The search market is going to go through some very big transformations as the Yahoo-Microsoft deal unfolds but for the time being little has changed from the users' perspective. So it's no surprise that the July numbers for search market share haven't changed that much from the previous month though there have been some interesting developments. New Nielsen data shows Google, while having more searches overall, lost 1.3 percent of the market share but the real interesting part is the fact that Yahoo managed to grow 11 percent last month.
All major players along with the whole market grew in July with 10 percent, roughly 500 million, more searches being conducted in the US. Google users did about 200 million more searches than in June, a 3 percent increase, but Google's piece of the overall search market actually dropped 1.3 percent, from 66.1 percent in June to 64.8 in July. At this point most would assume this had something to do with Microsoft's recently launched Bing and the new search engine has in fact grown in the number of searches but also in market share.
Bing saw almost 70 million more searches in July, an 8 percent growth, and also a slight bump in market share from 8.8 percent to 9 percent. But the real winner here is in fact Yahoo, adding 0.9 percent to its market share, grabbing 17.1 percent of the market, while also seeing 11 percent more searches conducted on its sites. In fact, Yahoo sites saw almost 190 million more searches, growing in absolute numbers almost as much as Google.
The growth comes as somewhat of a surprise but Yahoo has seen considerable spotlight after selling its search business to Microsoft and the new Yahoo homepage likely helped also. It is pretty ironic though to see a search engine whose time is numbered outperform itself like this but it should be interesting to watch how the market evolves as the sale comes to fruition and Google prepares to launch an overhauled backend with its new Caffeine project.