Bing Gains More Ground in Search Engine Market Share, Yahoo Resumes Downward Slide

Bing grew their search engine market share for the third month running, at the expense of both Google and Yahoo. Microsoft’s search engine increased its market share from 15.7 percent to 15.9 percent, comScore reported. Bing’s share of the search market was 14.7 percent in August 2011.

Google fell only slightly from its record high of 66.8 percent to 66.4 percent. In August 2011, Google’s search market share was at 64.8 percent.

Meanwhile, Yahoo resumed the slide they’d halted by holding steady last month, dropping from 13 percent to 12.8 percent. They had fallen in each of the 10 months prior. In August 2011, Yahoo’s search market share was 16.3 percent.

Ask grew their share from 3.1 percent to 3.2 percent. AOL also moved up slightly, marking the first deviation from their constant 1.5 percent with an increase to 1.7 percent.

In total, 68.8 percent of organic searches were performed through Google, while 25.3 percent were powered by Bing.

Explicit core searches shrank, from 17.7 billion in July to 17 billion in August. Google led with 11.3 billion searches (down from 11.8 billion in July); Bing accounted for 2.7 billion, on par with July. Yahoo was again in third place and unchanged, at 2.2 billion; Ask grew slightly with 550 million (up from 548 million) and AOL increased from 264 million to 292 million over the month previous.

ComScore’s figured reflect searches from Home & work locations only, not mobile. This month, they incorporated two changes in reporting, as follows:

“The first enhancement is the incorporation of updated demographic universe estimates based on data from the 2010 U.S. census, which provides an improved accounting of the percentage of the population falling into each demographic segment. The second enhancement was an improvement in comScore’s enumeration survey methodology to better represent persons in cell-phone only households.”