Google reigns in search for September while Yahoo falls off
New data from ComScore shows that the monthly trend remained the same -- users flocked to Google, toyed with Bing, and dropped off from Yahoo.
Surprise, surprise, Google is still the king of search in the U.S. In fact, any other search engine pales in user numbers comparison.
According to new data released by digital analytics company ComScore today, 66.7 percent of users core searches in September were on Google, which is 0.3 percent higher than August. Trailing behind were Microsoft's search engines, which got 15.9 percent of the market share, and Yahoo came in third with 12.2 percent -- which is down 0.6 percent from August.
Over the last year, Yahoo's share has been in a steady free-fall. It finally lost its second place spot to Microsoft's Bing last December. Just a year and a half ago, Yahoo's search market share was 16 percent, by January it was 14, and now it's down to 12.
Other data from ComScore's report today shows that millions of people are still conducting billions of searches each month. According to the analytics company, people in the U.S. searched more than 16.3 billion times in September. Although that number seems high, it's actually down slightly from August, when people searched more than 17 billion times. Of these searches, 10.9 billion were done on Google, and 2.6 billion were on Microsoft sites.
The searches counted in this data are from home and work computers, not mobile devices. Other research out today from the Macquarie Group shows that desktop Web search declined in September for the first time since it began tracking this data in 2006. Macquarie analysts said in their report that the increasing number of mobile searches appears to be the biggest reason for the decline.