July’s search market share reported by Nielsen//NetRatings pegs Google at just under 50 percent, given their methodology; the top five looked the same as those featured in comScore’s report on search share in the US as well.
Yahoo trailed in NetRatings’s coverage also, picking up 23.8 percent of queries for July. But based on year-over-year figures, Yahoo moved up 34 percent, almost as much percentage-wise as Google did.
No other search site cracked ten percent in the survey. MSN Search had 9.6 percent, dropping 3 percent year-over-year. AOL Search fell to a share of 6.3 percent, down 7,8 percent year over year.
Ask.com had an impressive gain, as it more than doubled search queries year-over-year. Though its share of 2.6 percent derived from 150 million search queries, that still represented a gain of 106 percent by NetRatings’s calculations.
Different methodologies used by comScore and NetRatings yield different results. NetRatings analysis leans in Google’s favor, at the expense of those who follow behind it in search. ComScore’s survey indicates a playing field that is a little more balanced, but definitely tilted toward Google. While they both agree on the order of search engines, they disagree at just how much work each one performs when it comes to search.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
