Google eats away at Yahoo's US search traffic

Google continued to grab a bigger share of the search engine market in the United States while Yahoo continued to slip in February.

 

Tech site CNET cited figures from comScore indicating Google and Microsoft sites saw a slight gain in February from January, while Yahoo suffered a decline.

 

It said Google sites had a 66.4-percent share in February, up 0.2 percent from 66.2 percent in January; while Microsoft had a 15.3-percent share in February, up 0.1 percent from 15.2 percent in January.

 

Yahoo's share dropped 0.3 percent, from 14.1 percent in January to 13.8 percent in February.

 

Ask Network maintained a 3.0-percent share in January and February, while AOL Inc.'s share dropped from 1.6 percent in January to 1.5 percent in February.

 

CNET noted Yahoo has steadily been losing market share over the past couple of years, relinquishing second place to Microsoft's Bing in December.

 

"Looking at the hard numbers, Google captured 11.7 billion core searches in February, followed by Bing with 2.7 billion and Yahoo with 2.4 billion," it said.

 

But CNET also noted comScore's figures include only explicit core searches that users manually enter on a Web page.

 

On the other hand, it noted Yahoo and Bing remain separate search portals, but both are powered by the same engine.

 

Bing's share of "powered by" searches, which include those at Yahoo, totaled 26.2 percent last month, a slight dip from 26.5 percent in January.

 

Google's "powered by" searches, which cover results at AOL and Ask, grabbed a 68.6 percent share in February, a minor gain from 68.4 percent the prior month. — TJD, GMA News