Google widens lead in search market

25-06-2007

by Emmet Ryan

To no-one's surprise Google has maintained its position as the top search engine in the US, logging more than half of all search queries last month.

The internet giant increased its share of the market by one percent on the month of April, accounting for 50.7 percent of all searches in the month of May.

Google, which was the only search engine of the top five to make gains in May, has seen its market share increase by 3 percent so far this year.

The results, released by researchers comScore, covered 7.6 billion search queries that were made in the month of May. Google accounted for over 3.9 billion of these queries. The total number of searches performed by internet users in the US was up 4 percent on April's figures and up 11 percent on May 2006.

Second-placed Yahoo saw its market share drop from 26.8 percent in April to 26.4 percent in May. Just last week Yahoo appointed Jerry Yang as CEO following the resignation of Terry Semel who left the search engine in the face of ongoing criticism from shareholders.

Meanwhile, Microsoft's search engines held steady in third place on 10.3 percent, well clear of fourth-placed Ask, which saw its share dip slightly to 5 percent from 5.1 percent in April.

Time Warner's collection of search engines, which include AOL, dropped further behind Ask. Time Warner saw its share drop from 5 percent to 4.6 percent over the course of the month.