14 DAY TRIAL // New data from comScore shows little activity in the search sector, with the big three competitors maintaining more or less the same positions, namely Google in the front, followed by Yahoo and Microsoft. However, other players saw big increases in queries from April to May, and online classified ad website Craigslist grew 12 percent, from 583 million queries to 651 million.
While surrounded by some controversy over its adult ad section, the site has seen an impressive growth in searches and also boasts record earnings. Other websites with an upward trend include social networking giant Facebook, which saw a 5 percent increase in searches, up from 176 million to 184 million, and online video site YouTube, rising 4 percent, from 3.2 billion to 3.3 billion searches.
Meanwhile, May saw no change overall for Google sites, which accumulated a total of 13 billion searches, mostly from Google Search and YouTube. Yahoo online properties came second with 3 billion searches while Microsoft sites managed only 1.2 billion, both companies declining 4 percent over the previous month.
The “core searches,” defined as the searches conducted on the top five search engines, followed the same trend as the Mountain View-based company, taking up 65 percent of the core searches, followed by Yahoo with 20 percent, Microsoft with 8 percent, Ask Network with 3.9 and AOL with 3 percent. The numbers changed very little from April, with Google and Ask both rising 1 percent while the others dropped less than 1 percent each.
However, the overall market shrank with all of the 5 search engines declining in search numbers. The biggest drop comes from AOL with 12 percent, Microsoft with 5 percent followed by Yahoo with 4. Google also dropped 2 percent while Ask Network only 1 percent. It's important to note that these numbers are from before the launch of Microsoft's new search engine Bing, which has seen a steady, if modest, growth for the past couple of weeks.