The recent August statistics released by comScore prove that Google has an impressive 65.8 percentage of US search market share under its belt. Yahoo had 17.1 percent and Bing had 11 percent of the Search Market Share in August.
Search market share calculations
ComScore calculates search market share using a methodology called “Explicit Core Search”. They exclude contextual links and slide shows to determine each individual click. However because Yahoo and Bing recently added contextual links and slideshows comScore was forced to calculate metrics using a different method called “Total Core Search”.
Slideshows and contextual shortcuts make a difference in the search count because a single click on a slideshow triggers a series of sites to load whereby each slide is counted as a click. When users hover over some words in articles contextual links pop up and these are counted as clicks.
When they looked at the Total Core Search statistics, Google accounted for about 61.6 percent of the market share while Yahoo was at 20 percent and Bing followed with 12.6 percent. This difference in data prompted comScore to change its methodology and offer two distinct calculations, called Explicit Core Search and Total Core Search.
Experts have backed this shift in methodology. This is because explicit core search tracks only those searches in which users entered specific queries to get results.
Yahoo joining hands with Bing will change the landscape a bit but it is anyone's guess at this time as to how it will evolve. Will they or won't they be successful in leveraging their combined strengths to grab a larger search market share by taking some of it away from Google?