State of Search June 2012

Once again it’s time for a Search Engine share update, no not share market but market share. If you don’t want to read the analysis, the short answer is Google is out in front and increase from 66.7% to 66.8%, with Microsoft and Yahoo behind (even when combined).

Here’s the full ComScore Results for June 2012

comScore Explicit Core Search Share Report*June 2012 vs. May 2012

Total U.S. – Home & Work Locations
Source: comScore qSearch

Core Search Entity Explicit Core Search Share (%)
May-12 Jun-12 Point Change
Total Explicit Core Search 100.0% 100.0% N/A
Google Sites 66.7% 66.8% 0.1
Microsoft Sites 15.4% 15.6% 0.2
Yahoo! Sites 13.4% 13.0% -0.4
Ask Network 3.0% 3.0% 0.0
AOL, Inc. 1.5% 1.5% 0.0

So there doesn’t appear to be a huge amount of change in the world of search on the surface but lets take a deeper look at what these figures really mean.

Google Making Tracks

Although you may think 0.1% increase is nothing, its actually huge. In the history of the comScore index this is the highest EVER market share for any search engine. In July 2010 Google handled 62.6% of search traffic, in October 2011 it was 65.3% – from this we can see Google are moving further and further ahead even though the pace is now slowing somewhat.

Bing is Growing

Yes, really it’s growing – it may not be by much but it’s growing. It’s taken market share mainly from Yahoo (yes we know they are combined but the results are still separated) but it’s also recently had what seems to be a mini influx as users check out new services such as the social sidebar and webmasters take another look following the BWT update. The problem for Bing is that Yahoo is contracting and they are not picking up all of the pieces as they would hope. The above said 15.6 % is an all-time high for this search engine too! It will be interesting to see how this shakes out over the next year – it is my belief if they don’t get to 18 or 19% within 12 months Bing will hit problems as I suspect Yahoo will be at around 10% by this point, if not lower.

Yahoo is a Mammoth

Yahoo for many years was a big big player in search, its a name recognised around the globe and known for it’s portal website. Over the past 5 to 10 years though the company has begun to fail, as it’s failed to move with the modern times and become a leader in the area it once was a player in. Loosing 0.4% is not unexpected for Yahoo at this point, they really are the modern Mammoth that to survive the ice age needs to pull something big out of the bag. As of this post they still don’t have a new CEO, they’ve had a good few in recent years which has meant to company is more lost than ever. I’m not sure what will happen to Yahoo in the long run, but it does need to begin sectioning what it does to be more fluid and coherent – yes have a search box but become the new modern portal for news and gossip with search from bing, don’t try and be everything we don’t want you to be. The modern internet speaks volumes for wanting specific websites that do specific things, we don’t mind visiting 5 websites all for different things, but we do care if you put them in once place and it looks poop!

So what do you think of these results, will Google continue to grow, will Bing ever catch up and will Yahoo stop screwing around? leave a comment and let us know.

State of Search June 2012