Yahoo! Sites and Microsoft Sites have experienced gains in the US core search market in May, due in part to the continued utilisation of contextual search approaches that tie content and related search results together, according to a report from research firm comScore.
According to the report, Americans conducted 15.9 billion core searches in May 2010, with Google Sites accounting for 63.7% search market share, down from 64.4% in April. Microsoft Sites grabbed 12.1% market share, up 0.3 percentage points versus April.
Yahoo! Sites accounted 18.3% of the US core search market in May, an increase of 0.6 percentage points compared to 17.7% in April 2010. Ask Network reported a decrease of 0.1 percentage points to 3.6% from 3.7% in April, while AOL Network share of searches also decreased by 0.1% to 2.3%.
In May 2010, Google Sites led the search market with 14.44 billion search queries, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.99 billion queries and Microsoft Sites with 2.0 billion searches. Searches on Bing Sites increased 4% to 1.64 billion from 1.58 billion in April 2010.
According to the report, Ask.com search queries decreased by 2% to 319 million from 327 million, and AOL search network queries were also down by 4% to 290 million from 302 million in April.
Social networking site Facebook reported a decline of 2% to 609 million searches compared to 624 million searches. MySpace sites decreased marginally to 307 million, Amazon sites improved 14% to 280 million and eBay reported 1% increase to 647 million.
