U.S. January Search Share For Google Fell, With Gains For Others

[engine]

U.S. January Search Share For Google Fell, With Gains For Others [searchengineworld.com]

Google saw its share of the search engine market in the United States fall slightly during January 2009, while its three largest rivals Yahoo, Microsoft and Time Warner's AOL each increased their shares.
While Google maintained its long streak of dominance atop the U.S. search marketplace rankings in January, it's 63 percent share was a 0.5 percent drop from the 63.5 percent share comScore reported during December 2008.

Despite its drop in overall U.S. search market share Google users performed 6 percent more search queries during January than during December 2008, with an 8.497 billion total for the month, a 461 million increase from a December 2008 total of 8.036 billion queries, according to the comScore core search query report.

[nealrodriguez]

experimental january;

#1 new year's resolution:

sewing my searching oats: use more engines to which google lost its users.

maybe it had to do with that malware issue to which google was linking people

[maximillianos]

Or maybe it had to do with the fact that comScore just guesses what the numbers are based on their small-scale surveys... ;-)

[signor_john]

Or maybe it had to do with the fact that comScore just guesses what the numbers are based on their small-scale surveys... ;-)

Surely you don't mean to imply that a huge drop in market share (from 63.5 percent to a mere 63 percent) is the result of an inadequate sample? :-)

[maximillianos]

Oh no... not at all. I wonder how many comScore relatives are selling G stock short this week... ;-)

[zett]

About time.

[ogletree]

That is all well within the margin of error. This data really means nothing. Google has way more that 65%.

[pageoneresults]

Hitwise reports otherwise...

2009 February
Google 72.11%
Yahoo! 17.52%
MSN/Live 5.55%
Ask 3.47%

2008 December
Google 72.07%
Yahoo! 17.79%
MSN 4.10% * (does not include Live)
Ask 3.15%

[sobole]

Good. Maybe the monopoly will start to loosen up.

[ogletree]

Don't forget that AOL is pretty much the same as Google they show google results and google ads.

[IanKelley]

It seems most everyone in the webmaster community is aware that the monthly Comscore (or any similar reader of tea leaves) data has no basis in reality. For comparison purposes their data might be useful over a longer period of time, but monthly it's a joke.

Which begs the question, why does it keep ending up on the front page of WW?