ComScore: Yahoo Bounces Back From All-Time Low In Search Share

ComScore: Yahoo Bounces Back From All-Time Low In Search Share

With 3% more searches than the previous month, Yahoo pulls back above 10% market share. Bing also gains while Google falls slightly.

After dropping below a 10% market share for search for the first time in June, Yahoo creeped back above that threshold, according to ComScore’s July search engine rankings.

Yahoo checked in with a 10.0% share, a 0.2 percentage point gain over its record low in June. Yahoo had 1.8 billion searches in the month, a 3% increase over June.

Yahoo’s month-over-month percentage change beat the industry overall by three times. ComScore reported 18 billion total searches in July, a 1% increase. Google (12.1 billion searches) and Bing (3.5 billion) also were each up 1%.

In market share Bing jumped slightly — 0.1 percentage point — to give it 19.3%, while Google’s share fell 0.2 percentage points to 67.4%.

Yahoo Search Share Falls Below 10 Percent For “All-Time Low”

We’re on the cusp of new comScore U.S. search market share data for June. According to financial analyst notes, releasing the numbers early, desktop search declined for the fifth consecutive month after a period of growth in mid-2013.

The big headline, however, is what we’ve been anticipating: Yahoo’s share has now fallen below 10 percent. This is an “all-time low.” The combined Yahoo-Bing “search alliance” share remains flat at 29 percent. Bing has grown almost entirely at Yahoo’s expense.

Here are the figures for June:

• Google: 67.6 percent
• Bing: 19.2 percent
• Yahoo: 9.8 percent
• Others: 3.4 percent

These figures do not include mobile search, which is an increasingly large share of overall volume. Mobile now drives more than 30 percent of total US internet traffic.

Paid search growth was one of the bright spots for Yahoo in an otherwise disappointing Q2 earnings release. Yahoo paid search brought in $403 million in Q2, a 5 percent increase vs. $385 million in Q2 last year. Obviously eroding PC search volumes will dampen Yahoo’s future growth opportunity.

According to StatCounter, Yahoo has a 9.3 percent share of the US mobile search market. Google dominates at 85 percent and Bing’s share is 5.5 percent.