comScore releases the December rankings for search engines; and here are the results.
In December 2006, Google gained .4 share from November, to lead with 47.3% market, and Yahoo! went up .3, continuing with the second largest share of 28.5% . Microsoft share dropped .5 points to 10.5% share, Ask fell .1 points to 5.5% share, and Time Warner share shrunk by .2 points, to close at 4.9% share.
In addition, comScore notes that:
• Americans conducted 6.7 billion searches online in December, up 1 percent versus November. Annual growth rates in search query volume remained strong with a 30-percent increase since the same month a year ago.
• Google Sites led the pack with 3.2 billion search queries performed, followed by Yahoo Sites (1.9 billion), MSN-Microsoft (713 million), Ask Network (363 million), and Time Warner Network (335 million).
Here’s Compete’s relative ranking of the top search engines for December 2006:
http://blog.compete.com/2007/01/15/search-market-share-december-2006/?int=1032
“The two sites disagree on Yahoo! and AOL directionally. For Yahoo! comScore shows a gain; Compete shows a loss of share. Regarding AOL, Compete shows a bit of a recovery while comScore shows further erosion.”
It is very puzzling why MSN is and has been in constant decline.
Where are their users SUDDENLY going, it must be very frustrating.
Search is the one obstacle Microsoft just can not master.
Their Web 2.0 releases, while quite competative, just has not drawn users.
It would be an amazing feat if in a few years, ASK catches up with them.
In fact, it might be better if MSN acquired ASK and used THEIR serps, since many of MSN’s users are just using their Default homepage search – just as AOLs users are.
From a competition point of views its good to see Yahoo! has stopped the declined it faced a couple of months ago; I guess a lot of that is down to Yahoo! Answers which has been a huge success.
Although I am skeptical at the accuracy of the data from comScore; its still a worry to see MSN and ASK dropping month on month.
This is going to sound tired, but marketshare reports need to be standardized or atleast better labeled.
Compete’s report clearly states it’s of “Web Search”, which excludes image, blog, etc. As a result, we see Yahoo still losing ground. Yahoo Answers is not considered in Compete’s report.
When I look at the comScore report it seems to include all searches and includes Yahoo Answers.
Ultimately I think both reports have merit, but need to be clearly labeled, so we can make more accurate conclusions.
By comparing these two reports you can derive that Yahoo Answers continues to be a big win for Yahoo, but is not generating cross usage with its core Web Search service – which is, of course, where the money is made.
I would like to see share of ‘image search’, ‘share of news search’, ‘share of social search (ie Answers)’, etc.
I would love to see comcscore and other analytics companies releasing the comprehensive search engine ranking list (top 20 in all categories) instead of just top 5 or so.
A 30% increase over that month the previous year?! Such an increase tells me that the search engines have yet to reach full saturation … that, or people are relying on the search engines more and more, for simple questions as well as usual searches (or, instead of their list of bookmarks).
But how reliable is this comscore statistics? IM sure each search engine has their own stats too.
The number of searches performed is not a reflection of the number of visitors a site receives. Microsoft branded an entirely new search domain this year and it has built up the traffic for that search domain to 64 million users per month. That’s hardly a “decline”.
The Microsoft network overall continues to see more reported unique visitors than Google’s network.
Let’s wait until we see some actual apples-to-apples comparisons before we start playing requiems for Live Search. They’ve done a tremendous job for the first year — probably better than any search engine before them — and it’s both sad and laughable that search industry pundits have completely missed the obvious facts of the matter.
If fewer people are performing more searches at Google, what does that say about the quality of Google’s search? In itself, nothing. But it’s a pendulum that swings wide in both directions.
More data is needed before we can really be sure of what is going on. But it’s obvious that Live Search is alive and kicking.
In response to Michael Martinez comment that Live Search is
“alive and kicking” I totally agree we can’t jump to the conclusion that Live search has passed away based on one source reference and one months worth of data. Infact much of the changes that Microsoft have put in place shouldn’t start to have an effect until end of the first quarter.
The problem with Live Search is that Microsoft is slow to update their index. Their spiders have a disadvantage since they usually don’t crawl as often as Google’s.