comScore Releases December 2012 U.S. Search Engine Rankings

RESTON, VA – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released its monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the U.S. search marketplace. Google Sites led the explicit core search market in December 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 December with 66.7 percent market share, followed by Microsoft Sites with 16.3 percent (up 0.1 percentage points) and Yahoo! Sites with 12.2 percent (up 0.1 percentage points). Ask Network accounted for 3 percent of explicit core searches, followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.8 percent (up 0.1 percentage points).

comScore Explicit Core Search Share Report*
December 2012 vs. November 2012 
Total U.S. – Home & Work Locations
Source: comScore qSearch
Core Search Entity Explicit Core Search Share (%)
Nov-12 Dec-12 Point Change
Total Explicit Core Search 100.0% 100.0% N/A
Google Sites 67.0% 66.7% -0.3
Microsoft Sites 16.2% 16.3% 0.1
Yahoo! Sites 12.1% 12.2% 0.1
Ask Network 3.0% 3.0% 0.0
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 17.6 billion explicit core searches were conducted in December (up 4 percent), with Google Sites ranking first with 11.8 billion (up 4 percent). Microsoft Sites ranked second with 2.9 billion searches (up 5 percent), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.2 billion (up 5 percent), Ask Network with 534 million (up 5 percent) and AOL, Inc. with 310 million (up 4 percent).

comScore Explicit Core Search Query Report
December 2012 vs. November 2012 
Total U.S. – Home & Work Locations
Source: comScore qSearch
Core Search Entity Explicit Core Search Queries (MM)
Nov-12 Dec-12 Percent Change
Total Explicit Core Search 16,957 17,628 4%
Google Sites 11,359 11,763 4%
Microsoft Sites 2,741 2,867 5%
Yahoo! Sites 2,054 2,154 5%
Ask Network 506 534 5%
AOL, Inc. 297 310 4%

“Powered By” Reporting

In December, 69.1 percent of searches carried organic search results from Google, while 25.6 percent of searches were powered by Bing (up 0.2 percentage points).

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