Search Engine Market Share Wars 2013: Google Continues Lead in February, Microsoft Gaining Some Traction & Yahoo Shrinking?

Internet analytics service comScore has released its February rankings of U.S. search engines.

As expected, Google sites continued to dominate with a 67.5% market share. This reflects a 0.5% increase from January. Microsoft's Bing and its related services came in a distant second with a 16.7%, up 0.2%, followed by Yahoo! sites at 11.6%. This latest ranking represents an all-time high for Bing's market share, which seems to have come at the expense of Yahoo's steady decline in popularity.

Rounding out the crowd was the Ask Network and AOL, with 2.6% and 1.7% respectively. These statistics were gathered from over 18.3 billion searches conducted in the month of February in the United States, and do not include mobile searches.

In comparison, a 2012 published ranking released in October showed Google's market share at 66.9%. Microsoft's sites were sitting at a 16%, showing an overall widening of the gap between Google and its competitors. However, with Microsoft as the only competitor to be gaining traction, we may be seeing the start of a marketplace dominated by Google and a growing Bing presence.

A 2011 ranking, published in March, likewise and unsurprisingly reflected Google's dominance, with a 65.7% market share. However, the interesting difference is Yahoo's 15.7% compared to Microsoft's 13.9%. The two effectively swapped places between 2011 and 2012, with a widening gap going into 2013.

In contrast, Ask and AOL's numbers have stayed relatively stable over the past two years, with Ask accounting for approximately 3.1% and AOL representing 1.6% in 2011. This could be taken as a sign that the two aging services have a small but dedicated base of users, who for whatever reason, are wary of moving on to more popular search engines. The most interesting battle between Google and Microsoft may be who will be the first to tap into this market first.