New data from comScore shows that Americans conducted 14.3 billion searches at the five core search engines in May 2009.
Nearly two-thirds (65%) of searches were performed on Google, 20% on Yahoo and 8.2% on Microsoft Sites.
Though the total number of searches was down 3.8% over April 2009, said comScore, Google’s share of searches rose eight tenths of a percentage point, up from 64.2% in April.
The shares for Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL declined slightly. Ask Network (3.9% of searches) was up one-tenth of a percentage point, while and AOL LLC (3.1% of searches) declined two-tenths of a point.
Google Sites accounted for 9.3 billion core searches in May, followed by Yahoo Sites with 2.9 billion and Microsoft Sites with 1.1 billion.
The total number of searches was down across the top engines overall, with AOL experiencing a 12% drop in the number of searches, and Google experiencing a 3% drop. Ask Network had the smallest percentage decrease, down 1%.
In mid-April, SearchIgnite published a report which found that US ad spending among its clients was down 4% in the first three months of the year when compared to the same period a year earlier (see US search advertising showing signs of first quarter decline).
Elsewhere, Screen Digest, predicted that US online advertising will fall 5% in 2009 (see US online advertising forecast to fall 5% in 2009)
It said that while internet advertising grew 10% in 2008, the fourth quarter was almost flat at +2.6%, a significant change from the first nine months of the year which were up approximately 15%.
