Google Stays At Top Of Search Heap

SearchEnginesNielsen Online and comScore have released their search market share rankings for May, and as usual, Google has taken a spot atop the heap. Both Internet measurement services pegged the search giant's market share at about 60%. Nielsen recorded 4.7 billion queries for the giant, while comScore recorded 6.6 billion.

In contrast, the stats show negative trends for Yahoo in terms of search volume. Nielsen pegs the embattled Web giant's search market share at about 17%, with query volume down almost 14% from May 2007. comScore upgrades Yahoo's search market share to about 21%, but in terms of query volume, Yahoo's 2.4 billion monthly searches are about to be eclipsed by searches on YouTube alone, which jumped by 11% to hit 2 billion in May.

In terms of overall search volume, the companies' counts on the number of queries generated in May differ, but clearly show that Americans' search activity continues to increase. comScore's qSearch report, for example, found that there were 10.8 billion search queries across the big five (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask and AOL) engines. Up 2% from April, those queries include searches syndicated across partner sites, but not video, map or local directory-based searches. Nielsen on the other hand, pegs total U.S. queries at 7.8 billion, up nearly 10% year-over-year.

Non-core search activity also continued to rise. In the battle of the social networks, News Corp.'s MySpace snagged 395 million queries, up 12% from April. Searches on Facebook hit 121 million, up 8%. For the shopping giants, eBay's 449 million searches clobbered Amazon with just 141 million.

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