comScore Releases September 2012 U.S. Search Engine Rankings

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

U.S. Explicit Core Search

Google Sites led the U.S. explicit core search market in September with 66.7 percent market share (up 0.3 percentage points), followed by Microsoft Sites with 15.9 percent and Yahoo! Sites with 12.2 percent. Ask Network accounted for 3.5 percent of explicit core searches (up 0.3 percentage points), followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.8 percent (up 0.1 percentage points).

comScore Explicit Core Search Share Report*
September 2012 vs. August 2012 
Total U.S. – Home & Work Locations
Source: comScore qSearch
Core Search Entity Explicit Core Search Share (%)
Aug-12 Sep-12 Point Change
Total Explicit Core Search 100.0% 100.0% N/A
Google Sites 66.4 66.7 0.3
Microsoft Sites 15.9 15.9 0.0
Yahoo! Sites 12.8 12.2 -0.6
Ask Network 3.2 3.5 0.3
AOL, Inc. 1.7 1.8 0.1

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

More than 16.3 billion explicit core searches were conducted in September, with Google Sites ranking first with 10.9 billion. Microsoft Sites ranked second with 2.6 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2 billion, Ask Network with 565 million (up 3 percent) and AOL, Inc. with 287 million.

comScore Explicit Core Search Query Report
September 2012 vs. August 2012 
Total U.S. – Home & Work Locations
Source: comScore qSearch
Core Search Entity Explicit Core Search Queries (MM)
Aug-12 Sep-12 Percent Change
Total Explicit Core Search 17,046 16,352 -4%
Google Sites 11,317 10,912 -4%
Microsoft Sites 2,710 2,597 -4%
Yahoo! Sites 2,177 1,990 -9%
Ask Network 550 565 3%
AOL, Inc. 292 287 -2%

“Powered By” Reporting

In September, 69.4 percent of searches carried organic search results from Google (up 0.6 percentage points), while 25.1 percent of searches were powered by Bing.

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