eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) September search share bounced back to 65.3 percent one month after a slower August in which the market leader totaled 64.8 percent of the search market, according to comScore.
Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) fairly plummeted to 15.5 percent from 16.3 percent for the month, during which former CEO Carol Bartz was ousted from the struggling Internet company.
Bartz was fired after failing to turn the company around following 30 months on the job. Yahoo CFO Tim Morse is the interim CEO for Yahoo, which is reportedly being shopped around after failing to revitalize itself in the face of Google, Facebook and other rivals for consumers’ attention.
Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) Bing, which powers Yahoo’s search on the back end, held its 14.7 percent share, failing to move the needle forward. However, Bing is one bad Yahoo month away from switching places with its partner.
Meanwhile, comScore said explicit core searches were up 8.6 percent for the third quarter, led by Google’s core growth of 7.4 percent for Q3.
Jefferies & Co analyst Youssef Squali noted that comScore does not count mobile searches conducted on Android handsets and other platforms, and video searches for YouTube, the world’s leading video publisher.
“All of these are becoming an increasing part of Google’s overall traffic, growing materially faster than U.S. desktop search,” Squali noted.
“By some estimates, 10 to 15 percent of all search queries are done on mobile, and Google has 90 percent of the mobile search market. International, mobile and YouTube are what explains the historical disparity between comScore’s reported growth for Google’s paid clicks and the company’s higher reported numbers.”
Google will announce third quarter earnings Oct. 13 after the bell. Thomson Reuters analysts believe Google’s third quarter net revenue will increase about 32 percent year-on-year to $7.21 billion on earnings of $8.74 per share.
On the company’s Q3 conference call, analysts will question Google CEO Larry Page about its pending purchase of Motorola Mobility (NYSE:MMI) for $12.5 billion, a move to bulk up its patent portfolio in the face of lawsuits from Oracle and Apple, which is suing Android OEMs for patent infringement.
Analysts also want to know how Google+, the company’s social network answer to Facebook, is doing. Depending on who consumers believe, Google+ is either growing or has grown stagnant.