AOL Sees Uptick in Search Traffic

During November, comScore found Google expanded its dominance of the Internet search market...but while Ask.com and Yahoo declined, Time Warner saw the largest increase.

Media metrics firm comScore has released its rankings of Internet search engines for November 2007…and while it’s no surprise that Google continued to expand its dominance of the search arena, what was surprising was that Time Warner Network—a.k.a. AOL—eked out the highest month-to-month point increase.

According to comScore, Google accounted for 58.6 percent of online searches, up from 58.4 percent in October. Yahoo came in number two with a 22.4 percent share of searches, but that’s down 0.4 points compared to October’s 22.8 percent. Microsoft’s online search efforts (including MSN Search and Windows Live Search) held their own, keeping even at 9.8 percent of online searches from October to November, and Ask.com saw a small decline from 4.7 percent of all searches in October to 4.6 percent in November.

But the big surprise is Time Warner Network, which includes AOL Search, which saw an uptick from 4.2 percent of search traffic in October to 4.5 percent in November. That’s still fifth place in what (arguably) is currently a two horse race for the Internet search market, but it may bode well for AOL’s somewhat labored transition from walled-garden commercial online service to free, ad-supported online services.

According to comScore, U.S. Internet users directed more than 10 billion search requests at the “core” search engines during November, which is overall a five percent decline from search queries in October. comScore notes that November can be a “softer” month for search traffic.