Searches Jump 9% in January, Only Yahoo Loses Share

Americans conducted more than 10 billion core searches last month - a significant 9 percent jump in searches from Dec. 2007, according to the monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the search marketplace in January (via MarketingCharts):

US Core Search Rankings

• Google Sites marginally extended core search market share to 58.5 percent, with shares essentially unchanged from December - and only Yahoo losing some ground.
• Yahoo Sites ranked second with 22.2 percent, followed by Microsoft Sites with 9.8 percent, AOL LLC* with 4.9 percent, and Ask Network with 4.5 percent.
• Americans conducted 10.5 billion searches at the core search engines - 8.9 percent more than in December.
• Some 6.1 billion core searches were performed on Google Sites, while 2.3 billion were performed on Yahoo Sites.
• The number of searches at each of the five core search engines was at least 5 percent more than in the previous month.

See tables of search leaders by market share and by number of searches conducted.

US Expanded Search Rankings

• Among the top properties where search activity is observed, Google Sites led with 7.7 billion searches.
• Yahoo Sites ranked second with nearly 2.5 billion searches, followed by Microsoft Sites (1.1 billion), and AOL LLC (903 million).

View Expanded Search Query table.

*In January 2008, Time Warner Network was split into two distinct properties: AOL LLC and Time Warner Network excluding AOL, with AOL LLC representing the core search business.

comScore Note: With January 2008 data, DNS error searches were added to qSearch reporting. A DNS error search is a search conducted through the address bar of a browser where there may have been a misspelling or typo in the URL or search string entered. In cases where the default search engine attempts to make sense of the user’s query and returns valid search results based on the interpretation of the query, those searches are qualified as DNS error searches. The inclusion of these DNS error searches may have had a very minor impact on search query and share trends compared with previous months.