March 2010 Search Rankings Change Little from February

Americans’ usage preference for online search engines changed little between February and March 2010, according to The Nielsen Company.

Google Search Maintains Dominance
Google Search maintained its comfortable lead in search engine usage during March 2010, with 6.39 billion searches, or 65.7% of 9.72 billion total searches. Yahoo Search came in a distant second with 1.3 billion searches, or 13.4% of the total. MSN/Windows Live/Bing Search followed with 1.2 billion searches, or 12.2% of the total.

No other search engine had a search total in the billions or double-digit market share. AOL Search, the fourth-most-popular search engine for the month, accounted for 245.8 million searches, 2.5% of the total. Total searches increased 5.8% from 9.18 billion in February 2010, which is likely at least partly due to the additional three days in March.

February 2010 Numbers Were Similar
Google Search led all search providers in February 2010 with a 65.2% search share, or about 5.98 billion searches, according to previous Nielsen rankings. Yahoo Search came in second with a 14.1% search share, or about 1.29 billion searches. MSN/WindowsLive/Bing followed with 12.5% search share, or 1.14 billion searches. AOL Search, the fourth-most-popular provider last month, had a 2.3% share, or about 207 million searches.

MSN/WindowsLive/Bing experienced approximately 15% growth in its share of US searches in February 2010, increasing from a 10.9% share and 1.12 billion searches. March 2010 figures indicate this growth has at least temporarily stalled.

comScore Results also Similar
comScore’s core search rankings use different metrics than Nielsen’s search rankings, but produced similar results in March 2010. There was little change in comScore’s market share statistics of the five leading US online search providers between February and March 2010. Google Sites led the core search market with 65.1% market share, down from 65.5%. Yahoo Sites slightly rose from 16.8% to 16.9% market share. Microsoft Sites also grew slightly from 11.5% to 11.7% market share. Ask Network and AOL LLC Network’s market share rankings remained virtually unchanged in the low single digits.