Google continued to dominate market share for Internet searches in January, although its lead narrowed while Yahoo and Microsoft saw their share inch up, according to new data.
Monthly figures from comScore show that Google’s search market share was 65.6%, down one percentage point, while Yahoo’s share grew 0.1 percentage point to 16.1%.
Microsoft’s sites, including its Bing engine, again came in third with a 13.1% share, or up 1.1 percentage points from December’s level.
Market share for IAC/InterActiveCorp.’s and AOL Inc., the fourth and fifth largest search engines, fell slightly.
Overall, users made nearly 17 billion searches in January.
ComScore has shifted how it reports its data after Yahoo’s “contextual searches” skewed results this summer.
While comScore’s definition of a search included the traditional search-box query type of searches, it also included some automatic search results that pop up without a user entering a specific query.
Now, the group is measuring US explicit core searches, which exclude contextual searches that don’t reflect any intent by users.
Source: www.comscore.com