Google chugs to nearly 62 percent of US market

Search, thy name is Google in the United States. Month to month changes noted by comScore saw Google take what Yahoo gave away.


Google picked up 61.9 percent of US searches in July 2008, up a bit from 61.5 percent in June as measured by comScore.

So how did the four-tenths of a percent get to Google? It may have been from their new search advertising partner, Yahoo, which saw its month over month search market share drop from 20.9 to 20.5 percent.

Microsoft's sites may have handed share to the engines at Ask and AOL, both of which followed Microsoft's third place share of 8.9 percent; that's down from 9.2 percent in June.

Ask rose to 4.5 from 4.3 percent, while AOL ticked a teeny-tiny bit to 4.2 from 4.1 percent.

The big percentages mask the numbers. For US-based queries, Google handled over 7.2 billion in July. Yahoo processed 2.4 billion. That's out of the 11.8 billion searches at the five biggest engines.

As Rich Skrenta noted some time ago, Google is the environment. There's no such thing as search engine competition, only search startups that hope to attract a buyer, much in the way heavily-hyped Powerset seemed to do when it parlayed lots of positive press into being acquired by Microsoft.