comScore Releases May 2012 U.S. Search Engine Rankings

News provided by

Jun 13, 2012, 04:01 ET

RESTON, Va., June 13, 2012 /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 May with 66.7 percent of search queries conducted.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20080115/COMSCORELOGO)

U.S. Explicit Core Search

Google Sites led the U.S. explicit core search market in May with 66.7 percent market share (up 0.2 percentage points), followed by Microsoft Sites with 15.4 percent and Yahoo! Sites with 13.4 percent. Ask Network accounted for 3 percent of explicit core searches, followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.5 percent.

comScore Explicit Core Search Share Report* May 2012 vs. April 2012 Total U.S. – Home & Work Locations Source: comScore qSearch
Core Search Entity	Explicit Core Search Share (%)
Core Search Entity	Apr-12	May-12	Point Change
Total Explicit Core Search	100.0%	100.0%	N/A
Google Sites	66.5%	66.7%	0.2
Microsoft Sites	15.4%	15.4%	0.0
Yahoo! Sites	13.5%	13.4%	-0.1
Ask Network	3.0%	3.0%	0.0
AOL, Inc.	1.6%	1.5%	-0.1

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

17.5 billion explicit core searches were conducted in May (up 2 percent), with Google Sites ranking first with 11.7 billion (up 3 percent). Microsoft Sites ranked second with 2.7 billion searches (up 2 percent), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.3 billion (up 1 percent), Ask Network with 521 million (up 2 percent) and AOL, Inc. with 268 million.

comScore Explicit Core Search Query Report May 2012 vs. April 2012 Total U.S. – Home & Work Locations Source: comScore qSearch
Core Search Entity	Explicit Core Search Queries (MM)
Core Search Entity	Apr-12	May-12	Percent Change
Total Explicit Core Search	17,106	17,532	2%
Google Sites	11,374	11,699	3%
Microsoft Sites	2,638	2,701	2%
Yahoo! Sites	2,311	2,342	1%
Ask Network	511	521	2%
AOL, Inc.	271	268	-1%

"Powered By" Reporting

In May, 68.9 percent of searches carried organic search results from Google (up 0.2 percentage points versus April), while 25.6 percent of searches were powered by Bing.

About comScore

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

SOURCE comScore, Inc.