comScore Releases November 2011 U.S. Search Engine Rankings

RESTON, Va., Dec. 16, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released its monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the U.S. search marketplace. Google Sites led the explicit core search market in November with 65.4 percent of search queries conducted.

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U.S. Explicit Core Search

Google Sites led the U.S. explicit core search market in November with 65.4 percent market share, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 15.1 percent and Microsoft Sites with 15.0 percent (up 0.2 percentage points). Ask Network accounted for 2.9 percent of explicit core searches, followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.6 percent (up 0.1 percentage points).

*"Explicit Core Search" excludes contextually driven searches that do not reflect specific user intent to interact with the search results.

More than 17.8 billion explicit core searches were conducted in November. Google Sites ranked first with 11.7 billion, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.7 billion and Microsoft Sites with 2.7 billion. Ask Network delivered 516 million searches, while AOL, Inc. rounded out the top five with 286 million (up 3 percent).

U.S. Total Core Search

Google Sites accounted for 65.7 percent of total core search queries conducted, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 16.3 percent and Microsoft Sites with 14.0 percent (up 0.4 percentage points). Ask Network comprised 2.6 percent of total search queries, followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.4 percent.

* "Total Core Search" is based on the five major search engines, including partner searches, cross-channel searches and contextual searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in these numbers.

Americans conducted 19.9 billion total core search queries in November. Google Sites ranked first with 13.1 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 3.2 billion and Microsoft Sites with 2.8 billion (up 1 percent).

"Powered By" Reporting

As a part of comScore's commitment to accurately represent the continued evolution of the search landscape, comScore is providing insight into the share of organic Core Explicit searches that are powered by Google and Bing. 

In November, 67.6 percent of searches carried organic search results from Google (vs. 67.7 percent in October) while 26.7 percent of searches were powered by Bing (vs. 26.1 percent in October).

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SOURCE comScore, Inc.