The rich got richer during the big holiday month of December, as Google and Yahoo gained in comScore’s search engine rankings while the competition gave ground.
The waters of e-commerce rushed through the aqueducts of search in December. Nowhere did they flow more strongly than over the falls of Google.
Internet analysis firm comScore said people jingled their way to Google at a brisk pace. Google picked up 47.3 percent of US searches for December, with more than 3.2 billion search queries passing through Google sites.
Yahoo sailed along in second place, a spot where they have been content to be in Google’s wake. Their 1.9 billion queries in December were good enough for second place, totaling 28.5 percent of search share.
Both Yahoo and Google saw their market shares increase from November 2006. Google November share of 46.9 percent rated ahead of Yahoo’s 28.2 in the month. Collectively their share rose 0.7 percent, and that gain came at the expense of the search sites trailing them.
Microsoft’s sites like its Live Search brought the company a December share of 10.5 percent, down 0.5 from November. Ask.com dropped by 0.1 to 5.4 percent, and sites run by Time Warner saw their share decline to 4.9 percent, down 0.2.
As a whole market, comScore said the 6.7 billion queries Americans performed in December represented a one percent rise over the prior month. Year over year, that volume jumped by 30 percent.
The numbers demonstrate a trend the lower-trafficked search engines need to overcome, a dropoff in year-end performance when profitable holiday shoppers take to the Internet in droves. While they may not be able to overtake the top two search engines, Microsoft and Ask need to do better at retaining their traffic at the end of the year.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
