Google's share of US search market drops

by Staff, Brand Republic 22-Aug-06, 08:00

NEW YORK - Google's share of the US search engine market fall for the first time in 11 months but it retains its dominant position with 2.7bn search queries performed on the site each month.

That figure gives Google 43.7% of the market for July 2006, down by one percentage point on June. At the same time, Yahoo! sites rose for the second month running, up by 0.3 percentage points to 28.8%.

The figures have been compiled by ComScore Networks, based on home and university internet usage.

They show that Americans performed 6.3bn searches in July.

Lagging behind dominant Yahoo! and Google, were the MSN and Microsoft search sites, which handled 15.5% of the searches performed, up from 12.8% last year.

Time Warner, which owns AOL, had a 9.9% share of the market, up by four percentage points. Ask lagged in fifth place, with 6.1% of searches -- although this was an improvement on the figure of 5.4% for the same period last year.

Google and Yahoo! also dominate the toolbar search market, with combined market share of 95%, split 50.3% to Google and 46.2% for Yahoo!.

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