Google’s U.S. search share slipped a touch in April, but still hit the 65 percent mark as Microsoft’s Bing search engine continued to rack up share.
Search leader Google notched 65.4 percent for the month, down from 65.7 percent through March, according to comScore. No. 2 player Yahoo nabbed 15.9 percent, up from 15.7 percent from the prior month. Bing meanwhile grabbed 14.1 percent, up from 13.9 percent.
None of these search market share calculations prove terribly exciting, but Bing’s rise is notable because it’s paired with query growth of 40.4 percent, over 5 times that of the overall market.
Bing’s query growth was 3 times that of the market through March, according to Jefferies & Co. analyst Youssef Squali.
For comparison, Google’s queries grew 6.5 percent, a deceleration from its 10.3 percent query growth from March, Clearly, people are at least trying out Bing, with some clearly staying the course with the fledgling search engine.
Bing’s growth has been interesting to watch in 2010 and the beginning of 2011.
The search engine, which partnered deeply with Facebook and has added airfare price prediction software and partnered with Kayak in travel search, among several other user perks, held 13.6 percent share in February 2011.
Though January, Bing posted 13.1 percent share, which means it’s corralled 1 full percentage point of share since the start of the year.
ComScore’s numbers reached subscribers the same day Google wowed the crowd at its I/O developer conference, unveiling its Music Beta by Google service, a movie application for the Android Market as well as Android 3.1 and its new Ice Cream Sandwich build.