comScore Releases October 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 October with 66.9 percent of search queries conducted.

U.S. Explicit Core Search

Google Sites led the U.S. explicit core search market in October with 66.9 percent market share (up 0.2 percentage points), followed by Microsoft Sites with 16 percent (up 0.1 percentage points) and Yahoo! Sites with 12.2 percent. Ask Network accounted for 3.2 percent of explicit core searches, followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.8 percent.

comScore Explicit Core Search Share Report*
October 2012 vs. September 2012 
Total U.S. – Home & Work Locations
Source: comScore qSearch
Core Search Entity Explicit Core Search Share (%)
Sep-12 Oct-12 Point Change
Total Explicit Core Search 100.0% 100.0% N/A
Google Sites 66.7% 66.9% 0.2
Microsoft Sites 15.9% 16.0% 0.1
Yahoo! Sites 12.2% 12.2% 0.0
Ask Network 3.5% 3.2% -0.3
AOL, Inc. 1.8% 1.8% 0.0

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

17.6 billion explicit core searches were conducted in October (up 8 percent), with Google Sites ranking first with 11.8 billion (up 8 percent). Microsoft Sites ranked second with 2.8 billion searches (up 9 percent), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.1 billion (up 8 percent), Ask Network with 560 million and AOL, Inc. with 309 million (up 8 percent).

comScore Explicit Core Search Query Report
October 2012 vs. September 2012 
Total U.S. – Home & Work Locations
Source: comScore qSearch
Core Search Entity Explicit Core Search Queries (MM)
Sep-12 Oct-12 Percent Change
Total Explicit Core Search 16,352 17,623 8%
Google Sites 10,912 11,787 8%
Microsoft Sites 2,597 2,819 9%
Yahoo! Sites 1,990 2,147 8%
Ask Network 565 560 -1%
AOL, Inc. 287 309 8%

“Powered By” Reporting

In October, 69.5 percent of searches carried organic search results from Google (up 0.1 percentage points), while 25 percent of searches were powered by Bing.

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