comScore: Google Continues to Lead US Search Market Despite Drop in Queries

Google continues to lead the way in the U.S. search market despite a 2 percent drop in overall search queries in September 2013, according to comScore’s monthly analysis of the U.S. Search Engine Rankings.

67 percent of search share in August and September 2013 was conducted through Google, followed by Microsoft at 18 percent. Yahoo ranked third with 11 percent search share, compared to Ask Network’s 3 percent. AOL continues to be in fifth place with a slowly growing 1 percent share of the search market.

Concurrently, 18.7 billion explicit core searches were conducted in September. While Google continues to take the largest slice of this pie with 12.5 billion of these queries taking place through its sites, the search giant saw a 2 percent drop over the previous comparable month where almost 12.8 billion queries were conducted.

Microsoft continues to rank second with 3.4 billion searches, followed by Yahoo with 2.1 billion, Ask Network with 474 million, and AOL with 249 million (up 3 percent).

In addition, 68 percent of searches in September were powered by organic search results from Google, and 27 percent by Bing.

ComScore releases qSearch ranking analysis of the U.S. search marketplace on a monthly basis. The research shows the number of searches and the percentage of share the U.S. major search engine services have received.