While Google doesn't yet have cause for legitimate fear in losing its dominant stronghold over the U.S. Search Engine market, Microsoft search sites (Bing, MSN.com) have begun to make noteworthy progress in overall percentage of search engine queries tallied in between June and July 2012.
comScore, Inc., a self-proclaimed leader in "measuring the digital world," has recently released its analysis of who's who amongst major search engine contenders. Included in the recent study were Google sites, Microsoft sites, Yahoo! Sites, Ask Network sites and AOL, Inc. sites.
In terms of the U.S. explicit core market share, Google maintains the majority at 66.8 percent with no significant changes seen between June and July. Microsoft market share went up from 15.6 percent to 15.7 percent. Yahoo!, which was seen steadily declining over the past year, held steady at 13 percent with no discernible changes seen during those summer months. Ask Network increased its percentage point slightly from 3.0 to 3.1, while AOL market share held steady at 1.5 percent total hold over the market.
To put these market share report results into tangible numbers, comScore tallied a total number of actual overall search queries in the U.S. in July at 17.7 billion, up 3 percent from the month before.
With Google's #1 ranking, the queries of this search giant went up 3 percent to come in at 11.8 billion for the month of July. Microsoft increased by 4 percent leading to a total of 2.8 billion queries for the second place title holder. Yahoo! Site queries rounded out the top three spots for July 2012 with 2.3 billion, maintaining the upward trend with a 3 percent increase. Ask Network queries also increased by a seemingly significant 6 percent, which calculated to approximately 548 million. The only company that failed to increase its percentage rate was AOL and its search sites, which garnered 264 million queries in July.