Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) search share fell a few ticks through July, yet the market leader clung to its seemingly perennial 65 percent search share in the U.S., according to comScore.
Google’s search market share, which by comScore’s calculations, hasn’t budged from the 65 percent mark since crossing that threshold in October 2009, slid from 65.5 percent in June to 65.1 percent in July.
Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) Bing, which has been working hard to gain share at Google’s expense, remained flat from June with a 14.4 percent share. Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) poked its head above the 16 percent mark again to 16.1 percent, up from 15.9 percent in June.
Microsoft has been powering Yahoo’s search for a year now, thanks to an agreement that companies inked in 2009 to collaborate on search. While Bing has grown its search market share from 8 percent since June 2009, Yahoo has steadily lost share.
Neither company is reaping financial benefits from their integration. Indeed, Microsoft’s online services division lost $2.6 billion on revenue of $2.5 billion, largely because of the Yahoo integration.
Still, most analysts agreed Bing must stay the course to keep Google on its toes and innovating.
“Microsoft must have a credible search-engine business to defend its core platforms and APIs, as well as keep its biggest rival, Google, honest by forcing Google to create sustainable business models in competitive markets like applications and mobile,” said GigaOm Research Director David Card. “And a somewhat more successful search engine would solidify Microsoft’s own ad business and open emerging revenue streams.”
Meanwhile, it’s business as usual for Google, which just launched Instant Pages for Chrome users after rolling out Google Image and Voice Search for the desktop in June.
Bing also rolls out new search tools, but despite some aggressive marketing, doesn’t garner nearly as much attention for them. This is largely because users are more interested in Googling than Binging.
Overall, comScore said U.S. core search accelerated to 10 percent growth in July, from 7.6 percent in June. The researcher counted more than 17.1 billion explicit core searches, which exclude contextual searches and slide shows, last month, up 3 percent from June.
Google commanded 11.2 billion searches (up 2 percent), followed by Yahoo with 2.8 billion queries (up 4 percent), and Microsoft Sites lodged 2.5 billion queries (up 3 percent).