The latest U.S. figures from comScore are in for June 2008, and Yahoo & Microsoft saw gains in search market share, while Google surpassed 7 billion searches in June.

Here are the percentages of searches handled in the U.S. by the top 5 engines:

 

1. Google – 61.5%
2.
Yahoo! -20.9%
3.
MSN – 9.2%
4. ASK.com – 4.3%
5.
AOL – 4.1%

The main point to keep in mind is,
how many searches actually went through these websites.

Here are the volume figures:

1. Google – 7.1 billion
2. Yahoo! – 2.4 billion
3. MSN – 1.1 billion
4. ASK.com – 501 million
5. AOL – 471 million

The interesting news is that Yahoo! and MSN both had a rise in search market-share from the month before.  MSN went from 8.5% in May to 9.2%, and Yahoo! rose to 20.9% from 20.6% in May 2008; that is actually two consecutive rising months for Yahoo!.  Many bloggers and search marketers suggest it could be due to the recent media attention over the sale of Yahoo!.

Google took a slight dip in market share from 61.8% in May to 61.5% in June, however its nothing to get excited about, there are always ups and downs.

IMPORTANT: Just because Google is number 1 does not mean you should be dropping all your advertising bucks on it.  Ads on Google can be 2x to 5x the cost of an ad on Yahoo!.  Granted the more fish in the pond the better the chance of catching one, but don’t discount the others because they’re taking silver and bronze medals.  Keep in mind that these are TOTALS for the United States.  A good search marketer looks for other factors when creating a campaign.  Demographics, age, gender, and geographic locations.  Both my mom and my dad’s homepages are set to Yahoo!, but both have Gmail accounts (Google Email services).  Yeah, I’ve never been able to figure them out…   Point is, if I was selling financial services for soon to be retirees, you can bet that I would start with Yahoo & MSN.

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