Search Engine Market Share Update October 2009

October 14th, 2009 by Richard Zwicky

Share and Enjoy:

As mentioned in my previous post about browser usage, I’m going to start posting more data, more often. This week I’m putting out search engine market share numbers. I haven’t posted a U.S. search engine market share update since March 2008, so I’m definitely overdue!

Rather than providing a simple set of monthly numbers, I’ve decided to provide weekly breakdowns using aggregate data from our suite of search marketing tools, which makes it possible you review a few months worth of data at a detailed level. I’ll try to update these every two weeks, with weekly breakdowns for now, to try and identify trends in very granular ways. Interesting high-level, and consistent growth for Bing, overall growth for Yahoo! as demonstrated in this chart. Remember, this is based on clickthrough activity.

Astute observers may note that these numbers differ from other reports. Our data is collected at the web site level, based on actual referrals received. While people may search any of these engines more often, but not click through to the results. We report on the activity we see hitting the network of sites we’re tracking, and we are very careful to report only on the search referral traffic, so this won’t include referral traffic from Yahoo mail or gmail, for example. We’ve also rolled up all the various types of Google search activity into “Google” and not separated out Google Image Search / Blog Search, etc.

U.S. weekly search engine market share breakdowns

As you can see, Yahoo! and Bing have been climbing, slowly but steadily, as a percentage of overall search engine referral activity. For more details, please view the weekly breakdown chart below.

Google Yahoo Bing Others
April 5 82.74%  9.49%  4.99%  2.77%
April 13 82.65  9.60%  4.99%  2.76%
April 20 82.03%  9.85%  5.30%  2.82%
April 27 82.20%  9.62%  5.41%  2.76%
May 4 81.26%  9.55%  5.22%  3.97%
May 11 80.98%  9.69%  5.17%  4.16%
May 18 79.94% 10.45%  5.32%  4.29%
May 25 80.06% 10.39%  5.37%  4.19%
June 1 79.80% 10.44%  5.39%  4.37%
June 8 79.48% 10.69%  5.53%  4.30%
June 15 79.41% 10.54%  5.79%  4.26%
June 22 79.40% 10.56%  5.79%  4.26%
June 29 79.52% 10.37%  5.62%  4.48%
July 6 79.51% 10.46%  5.48%  4.55%
July 13 79.69% 10.31%  5.56%  4.44%
July 20 79.61% 10.30%  5.62%  4.48%
July 27 78.21% 11.18%  6.18%  4.43%
August 3 78.77% 10.95%  6.06%  4.22%
August 10 77.92% 11.54%  6.36%  4.18%
August 17 77.33% 11.82%  6.80%  4.06%
August 24 78.11% 11.51%  6.27%  4.11%
August 31 78.62% 11.27%  6.27%  4.11%
September 7 78.68% 11.51%  6.80%  4.06%
September 14 78.35% 11.13%  6.50%  4.02%
September 21 77.43% 11.35%  7.11%  4.12%
September 28 77.65% 10.80%  7.27%  4.28%
October 4 77.78% 10.66%  7.23%  4.25%
October 12 77.78% 10.66%  7.21%  4.36%

In context of all three engines, here’s a chart of the global search engine referral rate market share numbers which does show interesting trends over the last few months.

Search Engine referral rate activity report

Enquisite collects data from a network of web sites distributed globally. The data used in this reports represents web sites distributed globally, accessed by searchers located in the U.S.

Let me know if you would like a similar report for the UK, Canada or other areas, please.

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Share and Enjoy:

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Search Engine Market Share Update October 2009”

  1. [...] Search Engine Market Share Update October 2009, Enquisite [...]

  2. [...] are only two that matter… Google and Bing, this is especially true since Bing now powers Yahoo (cite).  And most importantly, Bing is showing slow and steady growth (cite).  Its early yet of [...]

Leave a Reply