Comscore has released August 2008 search share data. I got a note from Thomas Weisel on the data:
August 2008 qSearch data shows that Google’s U.S. query share gained 60bps m/m to 59.1% and gained more than 8.7 percentage points from its 50.3% query share in August 2007. YouTube continues to be a big contributor for Google generating 2.49bn searches in the U.S., up 3.7% from 2.40bn last month and up 132% from 1.08bn in August 2007. YouTube currently represents 24.5% of U.S. Google site searches compared with 15.8% in August 2007. Yahoo’s share declined 86bps m/m to 14.1% and was down nearly 4.2 percentage points from a year ago level of 18.3%. Microsoft’s share declined 3bps m/m to 5.5% and was down nearly 1.7 percentage points from a year ago level of 7.1%.
John – Google’s desktop dominance is amazing! I thought you would find Nielsen Mobile’s report that ChaCha is the fastest growing company in mobile search worth noting. Here is the link – http://tinyurl.com/3vp62e
Is it reasonable to infer from the Youtube nos and share of Google that approx 25% of US-originating searches to Google (and its sites) may be ‘entertainment’ oriented as opposed to ‘information’ oriented?
I thought Google always wins, even while our financial markets are slowly collapsing
Google does NOT control 70% of the market. These query-based metrics are completely flawed because they don’t take into consideration all the rank-checking queries that people perform every day.
Google’s real market share, based on estimated visitors to search properties, is closer to 35% — and Microsoft is now the second most visited search property.
Measuring search market share by how many queries are performed is not only misleading, it completely distracts people from a far more useful metric: number of queries that actually pass traffic to other sites.
Now THAT would be a metric worth reporting.