In September, the trend is the same, Yahoo is going down, everyone else is staying put

Oct 11, 2011 13:21 GMT  ·  By
Google, Yahoo and Bing battle it out, but the competition in search is rather stale
   Google, Yahoo and Bing battle it out, but the competition in search is rather stale

It's business as usual in the search market, at least in the US, in September. Except for the rather somber fact that Yahoo has hit its lowest point in history, everything else is moving, or not moving as the case may be, according to the bigger and unchanged trends.

Google managed to turn the tides in September, according to comScore data, if only a little, and gained 1.1 percent points market share in just one month, one of the biggest, in fact the only, gain in recent months.

It's not a big jump, compared to Google's overall market share, which went from 64.8 percent of the Explicit Core Search market in August, to 65.3 percent last month, but it's quite a large jump.

Yahoo is seeing a large jump of its own, unfortunately, it's completely in the other, the wrong, direction. It went from 16.3 percent market share in August to just 15.5 percent last month.

It's a 1.2 percent point drop, a huge move considering Yahoo's small and withering share of the search market.

Bing on the other hand stayed flat at 14.7 percent, the same as in the previous month. It's worth mentioning that Bing also powers Yahoo Search in the US, and much of the rest of the world at this point, so the Bing+Yahoo market share diminished in September.

In the "also-ran" department, Ask boasts a three percent market share, the same as in the month before that, while AOL sees a minuscule, but hefty for its size, growth, going from 1.3 percent of the market to 1.5 percent.

It's also important to note that comScore only looks at these five search engines for its Core Search numbers, so the overall market share for all players is a bit smaller. That said, these five search engines account for very close to 100 percent of the search volume in the US.