Google Still Pulling Ahead in Search, According to New comScore Numbers

Google’s still sitting pretty at the top of the U.S. search heap, handling nearly two-thirds of all domestic searches, according to March data from comScore that contradicts a recent report showing Bing closing in on the search giant. Like Google, Microsoft’s Bing gained 0.3 percent of the search market in March, rising to 13.9 percent, […]

Google's still sitting pretty at the top of the U.S. search heap, handling nearly two-thirds of all domestic searches, according to March data from comScore that contradicts a recent report showing Bing closing in on the search giant.

Like Google, Microsoft's Bing gained 0.3 percent of the search market in March, rising to 13.9 percent, according to comScore's Wednesday report. However, Yahoo, whose search results are now powered by Bing, fell by 0.4 points to 15.7 percent.

Those numbers put Bing and Yahoo together steady at just under 30 percent of the lucrative search market -- a bit under February's numbers.

That contradicts a recent report from Hitwise that had Bing-Yahoo surging to over 30 percent, with Google falling. That report prompted some to suggest that in 2012 Bing could overtake Google, which many consider a search monopolist.

U.S. users executed about 16.9 billion "explicit core searches" in March, according to comScore. Ask.com and AOL rounded out the top five with 3.1 percent and 1.7 percent of the market, respectively.

Anecdotally, Bing's traffic to Wired.com rose about 10 percent in the same time frame. But it remains outside the top 10 referrers -- a list that has long been topped by Google, which refers 20 times as much traffic to Wired.com as its Microsoft competitor.

See Also:- What’s In A Search, If You Don’t Hit the Search Button?