Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) retained its seemingly locked in 65 percent U.S. search share through May, notching 65.5 percent in Maycompared to 65.4 percent for April.
ComScore said Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) and Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) Bing search engines maintained their exact same search share from April, posting 15.9 percent and 14.1 percent shares, respectively.
The U.S. made more than 17 billion explicit core searches in May, up 5 percent versus April. Google sites racked up 11.2 billion searches. Yahoo sites accounted for 2.7 billion, while Microsoft sites took third place with 2.4 billion searches.
Google maintained its share despite being fairly quiet in terms of search innovation in 2011 thus far, with the exception of some search quality improvements to its Caffeine infrastructure.
However, Google will convene its annual search news conference June 14 at the The Forum at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco
Formally called Searchology, this year’s event has been renamed Inside Search, as Google invitation to for the event noted:
“Please join us at Inside Search, an event where Amit Singhal and other experts will take you through an under the hood look at Google Search, share our vision and demo some of our newest technology and features.
Singhal, a Google Fellow, managed to wow the search world 9 months ago in September with Google Instant predictive search technology that retrieved results for users as they typed their queries.
It’s unclear what Google will announce at the event this time, though the company’s focus has turned to mobile and localized search.
Google’s usual host for its search events, Marissa Mayer, has been moved to Google’s geolocal team, where she is shepherding the company’s work in contextual discovery, or the idea that it will target search results to mobile phone users based on their location.
The company, which last month unveiled its Google Wallet and Google Offers mobile payment and local deals services, could announce some breakthroughs here.