Google and Yahoo each lost a smidgen of search engine market share to Microsoft Bing, which rose to 11.8 percent share through November, according to researcher comScore.
Google maintained its 66 percent search engine market share through November, slipping from 66.3 percent to 66.2 percent during the holiday shopping month.
Yahoo, whose search is now powered by Bing in the United States, fell from 16.5 percent to 16.4 percent. Bing, at 11.5 percent in October, clearly enjoyed small query share gains at its rivals’ expense.
These numbers counted explicit core search, where users hit enter on a result or clicks on an organic or paid result, a refinement link or on a vertical search tab.
comScore’s numbers suggest Google Instant, which lets users see results as they type their query, did not work its same magic in November.
Google launched the predictive search technology in September and comScore found the company’s search share grew from 66.1 percent to 66.3 percent through October, the first full month of the new search feature.
Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said in a Dec. 15 research note that while Google saw an acceleration in query growth in September and October — queries were up 18 percent year-to-year — Google saw a deceleration of query growth of 12 percent year-to-year for November.
“Given the data, it appeared Google Instant was having a meaningful impact on y/y query growth; however, November data suggests Google Instant may not have as great of an impact longer term,” Munster wrote.
Americans tallied more than 16 billion searches for November, which is dominated by Black Friday and Cyber Monday holiday sales.
Google commanded 10.6 billion of those searches, followed by Yahoo with 2.6 billion and Microsoft with 1.9 billion.