comScore Releases August 2010 U.S. Search Engine Rankings

RESTON, Va., Sept. 16 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- 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 August with 65.4 percent of searches conducted.

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U.S. Explicit Core Search

Google Sites led the U.S. explicit core search market in August with 65.4 percent market share, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 17.4 percent (up 0.3 percentage points) and Microsoft sites with 11.1 percent (up 0.1 percentage points). Ask Network captured 3.8 percent of explicit core searches, followed by AOL LLC with 2.3 percent.

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

Nearly 15.7 billion explicit core searches were conducted in August. Google Sites ranked first with 10.3 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites in second with 2.7 billion (up 3 percent) and Microsoft Sites in third with 1.7 billion (up 2 percent). Ask Network accounted for 598 million explicit core searches (up 2 percent) followed by AOL LLC Network with 366 million.

U.S. Total Core Search

Google Sites accounted for 60.5 percent of total core search queries conducted, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 21.0 percent and Microsoft Sites with 12.8 percent. Ask Network captured 3.5 percent of total search queries, followed by AOL LLC with 2.2 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 more than 16.9 billion total core search queries in August with Google Sites leading with 10.3 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 3.6 billion and Microsoft Sites with 2.2 billion.

A Note about September 2010 qSearch Reporting

comScore's ability to report qSearch data for September 2010 will not be impacted by recent changes in the search landscape, including the introduction of Google Instant Search and Microsoft's powering of specific channels of search activity within Yahoo! Google's introduction of Instant Search does not disrupt comScore's ability to measure search activity consistently, but does introduce a new dynamic that will be addressed in our data collection methodology.

About comScore

comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) is a global leader in measuring the digital world and preferred source of digital marketing intelligence. For more information, please visit www.comscore.com/companyinfo.

SOURCE comScore, Inc.