Google's Ups (Search Volume) and Downs (Market Share)

Ahead of today’s earnings announcement from Google, comScore just released its search market share figures for September. Google’s overall share of search queries in the U.S. dipped from 63% in August to 62.2%. Yahoo (YHOO) and Ask (whose search is powered by Google) saw the biggest gains.

U.S. Search Market Share (September, 2008)

Google	62.2% (down 0.8% from August)
Yahoo	20.0% (up 0.4%)
AOL	4.0% (down 0.3%)
Microsoft	8.4% (up 0.1%)
Ask	5.4% (up 0.6%)

On the bright side for Google, both its annual and quarterly search query volume growth rates are accelerating. Year-over-year, Google’s query growth was 38.6 percent, up from around 33 percent each of the past three months. (On a quarter-over-quarter basis, the growth rate was 35 percent). Wall Street will likely focus on this acceleration as a slight positive for the stock.

Google was helped by overall search queries growing 26.9 percent across all search engines. Only Ask’s search volume grew faster, at 45.5 percent year-over-year. And that helps Google as well, since Ask is a partner. AOL, another partner, saw 18.9 percent growth in search queries. Yahoo saw only 7.1 percent growth, and Microsoft (MSFT) saw a measly 3.0 percent growth (but at least its growth rate did not decline as it had each of the previous three months).

U.S. Y/Y Search Query Growth Rates (September, 2008)

Total	26.9% (versus 19.6% in August))
Google	38.6% (versus 33.4%)
Yahoo	7.1% (versus 0.4%)
AOL	18.9% (versus 14.3%)
Microsoft	3.0% (versus -11.6%)
Ask	45.5% (versus 29.8%)

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