Search Engine Market Share by Click Through Activity - December 2009

December 21st, 2009 by Richard Zwicky

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Surprisingly, I haven’t posted a search engine market share report in 30 days. We did post lots of other interesting data in the interim however. This week, we’re getting back to the evolving search engine landscape. Of course, not a lot overall has changed since our last look at the data.

Google continues to own almost 80% of the actual click through market share. We recognize that our numbers are different from some other reports. The core difference is our reports reflect click through activity, as opposed to general activity. As demonstrated in the post “how long is normal,” while most search lookup activity is on one word queries, click throughs occur most often on three-word searches. The same holds true for the various engines. A lot of people apparently run searches on Bing / Yahoo, but they refine their searches prior to clicking through. Hence, Google shows a much higher market share when we examine just click through activity.

As it relates to the change in activity over the last month, Bing continues to show strong forward momentum, and Yahoo continues to fade away. Sad, really. Google’s decline which started in June appears to have stabilized at a dominating ~78.4% market share. If we look at areas outside the US, Google’s share is even higher.

For convenience, this graph shows the change in Yahoo / Bing / and other non-google shares since May 2009. If you want to look at the raw data that for back you can view it on the prior blog post about search engine market shares. The data table is getting so long however that we’ll just show the last 4 months from here on out. I’m using an “all-time” chart to show the trends though.

The raw data for those who prefer the numbers:

Google Yahoo Bing Other
September 7 78.68% 11.51%  6.80%  3.01%
September 14 78.35% 11.13%  6.50%  4.02%
September 21 77.43% 11.35%  7.11%  4.11%
September 28 77.65% 10.80%  7.27%  4.28%
October 4 77.78% 10.66%  7.23%  4.33%
October 12 77.78% 10.66%  7.21%  4.35%
October 18 77.89% 10.65%  7.29%  4.17%
October 25 77.83% 10.56%  7.56%  4.05%
November 1 77.75% 10.46%  7.66%  4.12%
November 8 77.96% 10.21%  7.75%  4.08%
November 15 77.60% 10.39%  7.59%  4.42%
November 22 77.59% 10.41%  7.67%  4.37%
December 22 78.43%  9.73%  7.86%  3.97%

Enquisite collects data from a network of thousands of web sites distributed globally. The data used in this reports represents web sites distributed globally, accessed by searchers located in the U.S., and reflects click-through activity data.

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