U.S. consumers may not be spending as much, but they are searching more. Americans conducted 14.8 billion searches in April, according to comScore. That’s a three percent hike over March, and Google continues to dominate the search market.
Nearly 65 percent of the searches conducted in April were on Google. Yahoo placed second in the monthly rankings at 20.4 percent, while Microsoft came in a distant third with 8.2 percent. Beyond the top three, IAC/Interactive’s Ask.com and Time Warner’s AOL ranked fourth and fifth with under five percent of the total searches in April.
Google also grew more than rival search engines. Google saw 9.5 billion searches in April, compared to Yahoo’s three billion and Microsoft’s 1.2 billion. That puts Google’s growth at four percent. Yahoo saw a two percent increase and Microsoft saw a one percent increase from March. Ask broke out with a three percent boost. Apparently, some of the growth came at AOL’s expense. AOL posted a six percent decline in searches.
Looking for Revenue Growth
“Search continues to prove itself the central tool of the Internet, and Google remains firmly in control of that market,” said Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence. “However, given the market’s relative maturity and the recession, revenue growth is much more difficult to deliver.”
Indeed, although the number of search-engine queries is up a strong 68 percent over the past two years, comScore reports the growth rate of paid clicks is only 18 percent. That disparity caused Gian Fulgoni, chairman and cofounder of comScore, to ask: Why have paid clicks grown three times slower than the total number of queries?
From assessing the data, Fulgoni believes he has an answer: Because the ad coverage — the percentage of search-results pages with a paid ad — has dropped from 64 percent to 51 percent of searches….