On Thursday, January 21, December desktop search rankings from comScore was released. According to the report, Bing had gained slightly versus November, but most of the others are off only a fraction of a point.
Google was found to have lost market share and volume when compared to a year ago, when it had a 65.4 percent share. A year ago, Bing possessed a 19.7 percent share, but now has 21.1 percent. What we have to keep in mind is that the data provided only gives us half the story, as they don’t include mobile search data.
In terms of total market share, including “powered by” search, comScore says that Google controlled 64.8 percent of US search query volume, and Bing powered 32.2 percent of organic search.
According to the data shown in the chart below, month-over-month desktop search volume remained flat. When you compare this information with a year ago, PC queries were down by 1.2 billion overall. The reason behind this decline is mostly attributed to the decline on desktop searches on Google, which I feel has been transferred over to mobile.
As you can see, there is no information regarding mobile search volume, but when you look at Bing or Yahoo, it that lack of information doesn’t mean much, but for Google, it means a lot more. ComScore said that last year, mobile queries had overtaken PC search volumes in numerous countries, including the US.
What comScore should e doing is giving reports that includes a combined view of mobile and PC search volumes so we can see a more complete picture of where all the search queries are coming from. This way, we can see exactly how much Google is really making in terms of total search volume.