October Search Market Share Update: Most gain in volume but only Google gains share
Written by Simon Schanche (contact - e-mail) -- November 17th, 2009 | Share - Save - E-mailApparently October brought a lot of costume searchers online. After several months of declining search query volumes, October query volumes ticked up 4% m-o-m. Total web search activity peaked just shy of 13 billion queries in the US. Among the major market players nearly every engine benefitted from the lift in activity. However behind the rising tide only one engine managed to pull ahead of the pack.
Google saw a 5.6% m-o-m lift in query volumes driving Google’s market share up a full point to 73.6%. Despite the efforts of the other players, the “Google habit” appears to be growing to new record heights. Every other major player lost market share despite showing strong volume lifts of their own. Bing posted the second strongest gains in volume with market share essentially remaining flat. The only top engine to show a decline in volume was Ask which continues to ride the perpetual roller coaster of search share.
As noted above, the queries included in the market share calculations are web search only, not including search queries performed in other dedicated search categories such as maps, travel, shopping. In the coming months, Compete will expand the reporting to include these vertical section queries into the overall market share numbers. This comes as engines such as Bing focus their efforts on improving the vertical search experience. We shall see how this impacts the numbers and whether this has any impact on the “Google habit”.
The major takeaways for October 2009 ….
- Google reaches a new record market share of 73.6% on 5.6% in volume gains
- Yahoo! continues its slide dropping almost a ½ point in share despite volume gains
- Bing held market share nearly steady with a very slight 0.1ppt loss on the second strongest volume gains
- Ask dropped almost a full point and held the dubious distinction of posting the only volume loss and a sharp one at that.
- AOL held steady on a modest near market tracking volume gain
* Search market share includes web search only for the Adult US Online Population and is calculated based on unique queries within each session during the given month.
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November 17th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
Interesting, I would think that Bing would be getting some of Yahoo’s market share, but maybe that will be a slower process than I thought.
I don’t get the line graph — what is that telling is? How do we read that? Is it a percentage of their percentage market share?
November 18th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
Buzzlord,
The line graph is a 100 base index to a point in time (in this case October 2008). The trend line for each engine shows its relative market share growth over the past year.
November 24th, 2009 at 9:21 am
[...] of such a deal is a huge loss of traffic for any property that excludes Google. According to Compete, Google holds 73% of the search market share. Excluding that traffic would obviously lead to [...]
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