comScore Releases May 2012 U.S. Search Engine Rankings

RESTON, VA – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released its monthlycomScore qSearch analysis of the U.S. search marketplace. Google Sites led the explicit core search market in May with 66.7 percent of search queries conducted.

U.S. Explicit Core Search

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Google Sites led the U.S. explicit core search market in May with 66.7 percent market share (up 0.2 percentage points), followed by Microsoft Sites with 15.4 percent and Yahoo! Sites with 13.4 percent. Ask Network accounted for 3 percent of explicit core searches, followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.5 percent.

comScore Explicit Core Search Share Report*
May 2012 vs. April 2012 
Total U.S. – Home & Work Locations
Source: comScore qSearch
Core Search Entity Explicit Core Search Share (%)
Apr-12 May-12 Point Change
Total Explicit Core Search 100.0% 100.0% N/A
Google Sites 66.5% 66.7% 0.2
Microsoft Sites 15.4% 15.4% 0.0
Yahoo! Sites 13.5% 13.4% -0.1
Ask Network 3.0% 3.0% 0.0
AOL, Inc. 1.6% 1.5% -0.1

*“Explicit Core Search” excludes contextually driven searches that do not 
reflect specific user intent to interact with the search results.

17.5 billion explicit core searches were conducted in May (up 2 percent), with Google Sites ranking first with 11.7 billion (up 3 percent). Microsoft Sites ranked second with 2.7 billion searches (up 2 percent), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.3 billion (up 1 percent), Ask Network with 521 million (up 2 percent) and AOL, Inc. with 268 million.

comScore Explicit Core Search Query Report
May 2012 vs. April 2012 
Total U.S. – Home & Work Locations
Source: comScore qSearch
Core Search Entity Explicit Core Search Queries (MM)
Apr-12 May-12 Percent Change
Total Explicit Core Search 17,106 17,532 2%
Google Sites 11,374 11,699 3%
Microsoft Sites 2,638 2,701 2%
Yahoo! Sites 2,311 2,342 1%
Ask Network 511 521 2%
AOL, Inc. 271 268 -1%

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In May, 68.9 percent of searches carried organic search results from Google (up 0.2 percentage points versus April), while 25.6 percent of searches were powered by Bing.

About comScore
comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) is a global leader in measuring the digital world and preferred source of digital business analytics. For more information, please visit www.comscore.com/companyinfo.

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