US Search Engine Market Share Data – Jan 2009
25th February 2009
According to the latest qSearch analysis of the major U.S. search engines carried out by comScore, search continues to grow and little has changed in terms of market share of the top 5 search providers.
Americans carried out 13.5 billion searches in the month of January 2009. This figure is 7% higher than the corresponding figure just one month ago, in December 2008.
Expectedly, Google sites were the leaders in the number of searches conducted with 59% share of the market, followed by Yahoo! sites having 15% market share and Microsoft sites having 6% share of the market. AOL and the Ask Network had 3.9% and 3.7% respectively.
Of the 11.7 billion (up 5% from December 2008) searches conducted across all Google sites in January 2009, Google Search accounted for 75% while YouTube and other Google sites contributed to 25% of the volume.
Yahoo! and Microsoft’s search metrics are much more heavily skewed towards their main search properties, with both contributing to 99% of their individual total volumes.
AOL and the Ask Network, on the other hand, had a much more even distribution. 58% of AOL searches coming from the search network while 42% came from MapQuest and other AOL properties. Less than half (49%) of the Ask Network’s searches came from Ask.com while 51% came from MyWebSearch and other properties.
A comparison with the same period a year ago shows that Google’s market share grew 6% points between January 2008 and January 2009, while that of Yahoo! fell 2% points and Microsoft fell 1% point.

Yahoo!, though, has actually gained market share for the fifth consecutive month now, at the expense of Microsoft and Ask.com mostly, but also at the expense of Google last month.
Tags: aol, ask.com, comscore, google, live-search, market-share, search, yahoo
Share this post via:
10 Responses to “US Search Engine Market Share Data – Jan 2009”
Follow comments on this post through the RSS 2.0 Feed
Discussion on social networks & blogs
-
» Search Engine Discrepancies » Cornell Info 2040 - Networks : 12 March 2009 at 2:55 am
[...] Ranking Criteria Search Engine Market Share Data Posted in Topics: Education These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can [...]
-
Microsoft’s Market share in search under the Microscope « Dixon Jones : 7 May 2009 at 12:08 pm
[...] In the US alone, the share is about double, at 6% according to Comscore (http://www.accuracast.com/search-daily-news/seo-7471/us-search-engine-market-share-data-jan-2009/).Now both sources are very reputable, but I question what’s under the bonnet at Microsoft. What [...]

RSS
It seems that the top five search engines will remain there. Second-tier search engines and those in the remainging 13% are your best bet for cost effective local advertising and most of them are partnered with the big three.
Annalise
all in one search engine
Interesting read with some interesting and valued data, even if the data relates to the US market as opposed to UK data (sorry, we’re a UK based Internet Marketing firm!). I find it particularly interesting to see how much Google relies on it’s affiliations with sites such as YouTube. Without them, it’s dominance over the Search industry would be cut by 25%! It’s quite remarkable.
I guess google will continue dominating UK search market with the growing chrome and google OS users.
Yahoo give up the search, to reach an agreement with Microsoft to use Microsoft’s search data. Yahoo to abandon its own search technology, after the search to switch to Microsoft’s Bing
Thanks for sharing
Zap.mobi is the fastest mobile search engine. Where does it rank?
Will we see the Moore’s law apply to Google soon? We see the number of screw ups and law suits. When their PR runs out, lets hope Y and Bing have the capacity to pick up those users.