14 DAY TRIAL // While the search market, in terms of shares, is relatively static, it's growing on the whole, albeit not by a huge amount. There was a three percent rise in the volume of queries in the US in July, compared to the previous month, according to the latest comScore numbers.
"More than 17.1 billion explicit core searches were conducted in July, up 3 percent versus the prior month," the analytics company wrote.
"Google Sites ranked first with 11.2 billion searches (up 2 percent), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.8 billion (up 4 percent) and Microsoft Sites with 2.5 billion (up 3 percent). Ask Network delivered 494 million searches (up 3 percent), followed by AOL, Inc. with 251 million (up 5 percent)," it explained.
Note that these are Explicit Core Searches, what comScore calls searches initiated knowingly by a user.
This, compared to automated searches generated on some news pages or other places, a practice that both Yahoo and Bing engage in. This also excludes some Google Instant Search results.
In terms of market share, as previously reported, Google has seen a small dip while Yahoo gained a very modest amount and Bing stayed flat. Overall, there's not much movement.
There's another interesting metric, while there are five main players in the US search market, three with a relevant market share, only Bing and Google actually provide search results and have a search infrastructure.
As such, when looking at "powered by" market share, Google leads, obviously, with 67.2 percent of organic searches, down from 67.6 percent in June, but Bing has a commendable share as well, with 26.8 percent versus 26.6 percent in the previous month.
That said, Bing has a long way to go before it even think about challenging Google. Still, Microsoft has been pouring billions of dollars for years now, trying to make its search engine a success, so there's no reason to think they'll stop now.