Google increased its market share of searches in the United States in May, rising from 67.9 percent share in April to 68.29 percent in May, analyst firm Hitwise reported Tuesday.
During the same period, Yahoo dropped from 20.28 percent to 19.95 percent and Microsoft dropped from 6.26 percent to 5.89 percent. Fourth-place Ask.com increased slightly from 4.17 percent to 4.23 percent, Hitwise said.
Search share is financially important because it means there are more opportunities to sell advertisements.
In the U.K., Google had 87 percent search share to Yahoo's 4.09 percent, Microsoft's 3.72 percent, and Ask.com's 3.07 percent.
Update 4:07: I corrected a typo in the Yahoo market share statistics.
When you're talking about billions and billions of search queries, each potentially with some keyword-based ads alongside, every few hundredths of a percent of market share is important in the search market.
And that's what Google carved away from its main competition yet again, according to statistic for U.S. searches performed in April. Google increased its share from 67.25 percent in March to 67.90 percent in April, while Yahoo dropped a smidgen from 20.29 percent to 20.28 and Microsoft dropped from 6.65 percent to 6.26 percent. Ask.com, in fourth place, eked out an increase from 4.09 percent to 4.17 percent, Hitwise said.
The study also spotlighted Google's starring--and growing--role in sending traffic to various industries.
In April in the United States, Google was responsible for delivering about 31 percent of the Internet traffic at health and medical sites. For travel, Google was responsible for 23 percent of Internet traffic; for shopping and classifieds, 17 percent; news and media, 15 percent; and entertainment, 15 percent.
In all those areas and a few others, Google gained share over search rivals, Hitwise said.
(Credit:
Hitwise)
Yahoo Photos' loss is Flickr's gain.
Flickr's market share has risen as Yahoo Photos' has dropped.
(Credit: Hitwise)Yahoo began shutting down Yahoo Photos last month, and now Flickr passed it to become the No. 2 photo-sharing site in terms of Internet traffic in the United States, according to monitoring firm Hitwise.
Flickr now has 6.42 percent of the visits to photo-sharing sites, up from 4.57 percent in March, Hitwise said.
That's a significant jump, but it's not all Yahoo might want: Flickr's 1.85 percentage-point increase was more than offset by Yahoo Photos' 2.6-point drop from 5.79 percent to 3.19 percent. And Flickr also got a boost from incorporation of its images into Yahoo's search at the end of June.
Flickr remains a distant second in U.S. traffic compared with Photobucket, which rose from 41.4 percent market share to 43.52 percent in June, Hitwise said. However, Hitwise researcher LeeAnn Prescott said on her blog, "It is worth noting that Flickr has a truly global footprint and has greater share of the photography category in other markets."
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