Google builds on dominant US search position in October - ComScore

Google Inc. continued to build on its dominant position in the U.S. search engine market, as its share of searches edged up 0.3 percentage points in October from the prior month and rival Yahoo Inc. lost ground, according to comScore Inc. The market researcher said Google's search market share was 65.6% in October.

Yahoo's share shrank to 15.2%, off 0.3 points. Microsoft's sites, including its Bing search engine, edged up 0.1 percentage points to 14.8%, while IAC/InterActiveCorp.'s Ask.com fell 0.1 percentage points to 2.9%. AOL Inc.'s share was unchanged at 1.5%.

About 18.08 billion explicit core searches were made in October, up from 17.1 billion in September. Google again ranked first, with 11.86 billion explicit core searches, followed by Yahoo's 2.74 billion and Microsoft's 2.68 billion.

ComScore has shifted how it reports its data after Yahoo's "contextual searches" skewed results last summer. The group measures U.S. explicit core searches, which exclude contextual searches that don't reflect any intent by users.

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