Yahoo! Gains 11% Over Google’s Loss In Search Share

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Mashable reports:

while Google grew from June to July, it still lost market share to its competitors – from 66.1% in June to 64.8% in July, a 1.3 percentage point drop.

And who was the culprit that stole Google’s market share? Was it the fancy new Bing? No. Yahoo! The most unlikely of candidates.


This is an interesting story and a bit irrational. What has caused the huge swing in Yahoo!s (the non-search engine) search function? Could it have been all the publicity it received in its handing its search engine over to Microsoft?

From Microsoft’s perspective, it doesn’t matter if Bing or Yahoo! steals market share from Google. Microsoft wins either way. But it’s interesting to note that while searches went up all around, only Yahoo! experienced double-digit growth among the Big 4 at 11%. Bing grew by .2%. Google’s number of searches rose from roughtly 6.6 million to 6.8 million, but because the number of searches overall rose and Yahoo!s rose significantly, it accounts for an aggregated loss to Google.

Google may be reaching a point of diminishing returns. Increased competition from the Bing-Yahoo! partnership along with the deep pockets Microsoft provides could mean a struggle ahead for Google. Yahoo! and Bing together accounted for 36.1% of searches in July, not a bad percentage. Still, it’s barely more than half of Google’s share.

The big question today is whether we’ll see similar growth in August searches or whether Yahoo!’s new found popularity is an anomaly. What do you say?