Google Still The 800Lb Search Gorilla

Google sites led the explicit core search market in December, according to the results from research published whis week.

comScore released its monthly comScore qSearch™ analysis of the U.S. desktop search marketplace, and published the results on its website comScore.com.

Google Sites led the U.S. explicit core search market in December with a 65.4 per cent market share of search queries conducted, followed by Microsoft Sites with 19.7 per cent (up 0.1 percentage points) and Yahoo Sites with 11.8 per cent (up 1.6 percentage points).

“Explicit Core Search” excludes contextually driven searches that do not reflect specific user intent to interact with the search results.

Ask Network accounted for 2 per cent of explicit core searches, followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.2 per cent.

When it comes to searches, a total of 18.7 billion explicit core searches were conducted in December, with Google Sites ranking first with 12.2 billion (up 2 per cent).

Microsoft Sites ranked second with 3.7 billion searches (up 5 per cent), followed by Yahoo Sites with 2.2 billion (up 21 per cent), Ask Network with 372 million (up 5 per cent) and AOL, Inc. with 222 million.

In December, 66.5 per cent of searches carried organic search results from Google, while 29.4 per cent of searches were powered by Bing (up 1.4 percentage points).