At this point, it’s not news that Google is the dominant player in Internet searches: the company has led the field for years. What is surprising is how the company can continue to extend it’s lead in the search market month after month, with its gains seeming to come at the expensive of its (distant) competitors rather than simple growth of the overall Internet user base. Case and point: comScore has released its figures for U.S. Internet searches during August 2008, and found that Google accounted for 63 percent of the U.S. searches for the month. And, again, Google’s gain seems to have come at the expense of Yahoo and Microsoft, both of which saw their shares of the search market decline during the month.
Google’s jump to 63 percent of the U.S. search market represents the company’s largest single-month gain in five months, representing a 1.1 percent gain over its share in July 2008. Google handled almost 7.4 billion queries during the month, not including more than 2.5 billion searches performed at YouTube. Yahoo, the next-largest player in the search market, saw its share decline 0.9 percent to 19.6 percent. Microsoft sites (Live Search, MSN Search, etc.) also saw their cumulative share of searches go down by 0.6 percent to 8.3 percent.
Ask.com and AOL, while holding down the fourth and fifth places in the search rankings, actually saw their market share increase. Ask.com was up 0.3 percent to 4.8 percent, while AOL Search saw it’s share nudge up 0.1 percent to 4.3 percent.
