Bing and Yahoo are both still well behind Google in U.S. market share. However, ever since Bing’s release in the 2009, the Microsoft search engine has been creeping up on Yahoo’s number 2 position. And now, according to a comScore press release, Bing and Yahoo are neck and neck for second place.
According to the comScore numbers for November 2011, Bing managed to increase its market share to an even 15 percent (up from 14.8 percent in October) while Yahoo dropped to 15.1 percent (from 15.2 percent in October). Google is holding strong in first place at 65.4 percent (down from 65.6 percent in October). Bringing up the rear of the top 5 are Ask Network (at 2.9 percent) and AOL (at 1.6 percent).
In terms of raw numbers, this works out to approximately 17.9 billion searches in Google, and nearly 2.7 billion searches apiece for Bing and Yahoo.
These numbers are taken from comScore’s “U.S. Explicit Core Search” metric. According to comScore, this measure “excludes contextually driven searches that do not reflect specific user intent to interact with the search result.” As Matt McGee points out on Search Engine Land, comScore’s results also leave out slideshows, certain Google Instant Search queries, and mobile search queries.
Sources:
comScore Releases November 2011 U.S. Search Engine Rankings (comScore)
Bing, Yahoo Now Neck & Neck In U.S. Search Market Share (Search Engine Land)