X

Google inches up, Yahoo inches down

Yahoo's share of the U.S. search engine market continued to slip last month as Google upped its lead.

lancewhitney.jpg
lancewhitney.jpg
Lance Whitney Contributing Writer
Lance Whitney is a freelance technology writer and trainer and a former IT professional. He's written for Time, CNET, PCMag, and several other publications. He's the author of two tech books--one on Windows and another on LinkedIn.
See full bio
Lance Whitney
ComScore

It was business as usual for the U.S. search engine market in February.

Google gained a fraction of a point, bumping its share to 66.4 percent, while Yahoo lost a bit more ground, leaving it with just 13.8 percent of the market. Microsoft's Bing eked out a slight gain to grab 15.3 percent of the market and retain its grip on the No. 2 spot.

Yahoo has steadily been losing market share over the past couple of years, finally relinquishing second place to Bing in December. Looking at the hard numbers, Google captured 11.7 billion core searches in February, followed by Bing with 2.7 billion and Yahoo with 2.4 billion.

Related stories

As always, ComScore's figures include only explicit core searches that people manually enter on a Web page.

Yahoo and Bing remain separate search portals, but both are powered by the same underlying engine. Bing's share of "powered by" searches, which include those at Yahoo, totaled 26.2 percent last month, a slight dip from 26.5 percent in January.

Google's "powered by" searches, which cover results at AOL and Ask, grabbed a 68.6 percent share in February, a minor gain from 68.4 percent the prior month.