May 2011 Search Engine Market Share from comScore, Compete, Hitwise

Bing failed to steal any more searches from Google in May 2011, halting eight straight months of search market share growth, according to the latest comScore figures. Here’s a look at comScore’s rankings, as well as U.S. search engine market share stats from Compete and Hitwise.

comScore

• Google search market share grew slightly to 65.5 percent (up from 65.4 percent in April).
• Yahoo held steady at 15.9 percent.
• Bing held steady at 14.1 percent.
• Ask dropped to 2.9 percent (down from 3 percent).
• AOL held steady at 1.5 percent.

The number of searches increased 5 percent compared to April, growing to 17 billion in May, up from 16.2 billion searches conducted in April. Google ranked first with 11.2 billion searches (up 5 percent vs. April); Yahoo had 2.7 billion searches (up 5 percent), Bing had 2.4 billion (up 4 percent), Ask Network had 502 million (up 2 percent), and AOL had 254 million (up 2 percent).

“Powered by” searches remained flat month-over-month, with Google powering 67.8 percent of all organic search results in May and Bing powering 26.5 percent of searches.

Compete

• Google search market share dropped slightly to 63.6 percent (down from 63.8 percent in April).
• Bing dropped to 17 percent (down from 17.1 percent in April).
• Yahoo grew to 14.6 percent (up from 14.1 percent).
• Ask dropped to 4 percent (down from 4.3 percent).
• AOL held steady at 0.8 percent.

Compete also noted a 2.5 percent increase in search query volume compared to April. Unique visitors to Compete’s top four search engines increased in May.

Although Google’s market share declined, queries on Google increased by 2.3 percent. And though Bing’s search share declined, Yahoo’s gains helped increase Bing-powered search to 31.6 percent (up from 31.2 percent in April).

Experian Hitwise

One note before looking at Hitwise’s stats: these stats are for searches for the four weeks ending June 11, 2011. Also, Hitwise didn’t put out an official news announcement comparing data to the prior four-week period. We plan to check with Hitwise to get this data and will update the post.

• Google: 67.95 percent
• Bing: 13.80 percent
• Yahoo: 13.63 percent
• Ask: 2.64 percent
• AOL: 1.38 percent

The five most visited sites from search engines in this period were Facebook (8.65 percent); YouTube (4.71 percent); Gmail (3.02 percent); Google (1.35 percent); and Wikipedia (1.20 percent). Facebook received the largest percentage of visits (10.79 percent), with Google in second (9.13 percent), and YouTube third (3.80 percent).