by Search Copywriter
D. Warburton
D. Warburton
The latest figures from research firm comScore have revealed minor growth for both Google and Microsoft search engines in the last month, while Facebook has achieved the highest online growth among social network searches in September.Computer Business Review reports that Google is still the search engine market leader by a clear head, as the Mountain View giant held 64.9 per cent of the market in September - accounting for approximately 9 billion searches - up from 64.6 per cent in August. Microsoft's 'decision engine' Bing has also experienced a slight increase from 9.3 per cent in August to 9.4 in September, or 1.3 billion searches.
These increases correspond to a drop in Yahoo! searches, taking the second most-used search engine from 19.3 per cent down to 18.8 per cent at present, while further down in the highly competitive search engine stakes, both Ask.com and AOL have maintained a stable 3.9 per cent and 3 per cent share across both months respectively.
The most notable increase in searches this month originated in social networking sites, with Facebook achieving a 19 per cent gain in searches since August, while MySpace searches dropped by 12 per cent - however, the older social network still bags more searches overall than Facebook, with MySpace users making 494 million searches in September compared to Facebook's 384 million.
While these figures for a single month cannot be taken as indicate of trends, it is clear that Google's dominant position is still comfortably secure at present, following the news that Google dominates search advertising more than ever with a new record 81.2 per cent share.
While such achievements would seem to make the company all but untouchable, Bing's continuing innovations and the ten-year partnership between Microsoft and Yahoo! threaten to shake up the balance of power in the search engine market.
