January’s search engine market share figures have just been released by comScore, and Google remains the clear market leader in the US.
Overall, 10.5bn searches were conducted on the major search engines in January, an increase of 8.9% compared with December.
Google remains the clear leader, with users conducting 6.1bn searches with the company, while its search market share increased slightly, by 0.1% compared to the previous month. 58.5% of searches were conducted on Google in January.
Once again, Yahoo was a distant second, with 2.3bn queries on its search engine. The volume of searches was 9% higher than in December, but its overall search market share dropped by 0.7% to 22.2%.
MSN is way behind in third place, so it’s easy to see why Microsoft would want to acquire Yahoo’s search operation, though this would still leave them well behind Google in term of market share.
US users conducted around 1bn searches on MSN – slightly higher than in December, though its overall market share remains at 9.8%.
Both AOL and Ask.com managed to improve their market share marginally. AOL accounted for 514m searches, which equates to 4.9% of the market, while Ask handled 475m search queries – a 4.5% share.
