It’s that time again, time to review the ComScores for the previous month and see who is winning (probably Google) and who is teetering on the brink of complete and utter extinction (definitely AOL.) There aren’t any big surprises that will rock the SEO world, but there are some shifts that indicate interesting patterns. Let’s take a look at the numbers and see how it all shakes out.
Let’s start with the obvious. Google is enjoying a commanding lead. They hit their high of 67 percent a few months back, dipped a little bit during all that NSA stuff (where private search engines like duckduckgo enjoyed a small surge) but now they are back strong at 67 percent. This is .03 percent higher than last month, and .02 percent higher than the same time last year. All in all, Google has nothing to worry about, and it seems like an inevitability they will eventually crack 70 percent of the total search market.
Now for the newcomer in second. Bing is still going strong, slowly gaining share and doing its level best to keep Google from ever hitting that 70 percent mark. Bing is currently sitting at 17.9 percent, up 2 percent from it’s numbers this time last year. They are only gaining a couple tenths of a percent a month, but that’s better growth than any search engine out there. You know who would kill for that kind of growth?
Yahoo. They just can’t seem to get their act together. Despite Marissa Mayer—the new-ish CEO—saying that “search is far from over” for Yahoo, they hit another new all-time low this month. They are down to 11.3 percent, down two percent from their 2012 totals. They need a big move to stop their downhill slide and they just aren’t making it.
Now, time for the most bitter of sips, the dregs.
Bringing in the bottom, as always, we have Ask and AOL, both of which ares still enjoying ever-dwindling numbers. Ask is down to just 2.7 percent, and AOL is down to just 1.5 percent. To put there numbers in perspective, Google finds 2.7 percent in its winter coat pocket after a long summer and loses 1.5 percent every time it goes to the bathroom.