14 DAY TRIAL // The search numbers for June from comScore are out and they show Google losing a bit of market share at the gain of both Yahoo and Bing. These numbers have to be taken in the context of new features introduced by both Yahoo and Bing that may falsely indicate a rise in search volume. comScore has said it will change the way it measures searches, but hasn’t implemented that change so as to not affect the numbers for the entire quarter.
With that caveat out of the way, Google’s search market share in the US was 62.6 percent in June, down from 63.7 percent in May. Hitwise numbers also show a small decline. Overall, Google saw a rise of 12.7 percent in search volume from June 2009. In May the figure was at 9.1 percent.
Bing saw a small growth, up from a 12.1 percent share in May to 12.7 percent in June. In terms of search volume, Bing grew 77 percent year-over-year, up from 68 percent year-over-year in May. Yahoo also gained market share, with a 18.9 percent slice in June up from 18.3 percent in the previous month. It also saw a 13 percent year-over-year growth in search volume, up from 1 percent in May.
All of these figures are not adjusted for the changes introduced by Yahoo and Microsoft. A few months ago, both companies introduced features that created automated searches on various web properties owned by the companies. For example, an image slideshow on Yahoo News generates a new query for each photo. These searches are not initiated by the users and contribute a significant amount to both Bing’s and Yahoo’s search traffic. comScore has said numbers for the coming months, starting in the third quarter, will be adjusted for this.
You also have to take into account that comScore reports the core search market numbers, meaning it only considers searches done on the top five search engines in the US and divides that between the main competitors. Because the first five search engines make up well over 90 percent of the entire search market, the core search share numbers are very close to the global ones.