Google Gains U.S. Search Market Share for Ninth Consecutive Month

RESTON, Va. - comScore Networks has released its monthly qSearch analysis of activity across competitive search engines. In April 2006, Google gained in search market share for the ninth consecutive month and maintained its status as market leader with 43.1 percent of all U.S. searches conducted on its sites. Yahoo! remained in second place with 28.0 percent, while MSN ranked third with 12.9 percent.

Share of Online Searches by Engine
April 2006 vs. April 2005
Total U.S. Home, Work and University Internet Users
Source: comScore qSearch

Pt Chg vs.
Apr-05 Mar-06 Apr-06 Yr Ago
Total Internet Searches 100% 100% 100% N/A
Google Sites 36.5% 42.7% 43.1% 6.6
Yahoo! Sites 30.7% 28.0% 28.0% -2.7
MSN-Microsoft Sites 16.1% 13.2% 12.9% -3.2
Time Warner Network 9.0% 7.6% 6.9% -2.1
Ask Network 6.1% 5.9% 5.8% -0.3
MySpace.com Search N/A N/A 0.6% N/A

-- Americans conducted 6.6 billion searches online in April, up 4 percent from last month. -- Google Sites led the pack with 2.9 billion search queries performed, followed by Yahoo Sites (1.9 billion), MSN-Microsoft (858 million), Time-Warner Network (457 million), and Ask Jeeves/Ask Network (384 million).
-- MySpace.com has been added to the search engine rankings for April 2006, coming in at 6th place with 43 million search queries performed (0.6 percent share of the U.S. search market). Will this smaller player eventually be able to grab a substantial share of the search market due to the site's remarkable popularity?
-- Google and Yahoo! continued their dominance among toolbar searches, combining for more than 95 percent of the market share in April. Google grabbed 48.0 percent of toolbar searches, while Yahoo! captured 47.6 percent.

qSearch includes Web searches originating from the search engines reported, other Web-based searches such as News and Image searches and channel searches conducted on portal sites (e.g., Finance and Movies). qSearch does not include Yellow Pages or Maps searches.

For more information on comScore qSearch, please email searchsolutions@comscore.com or call (650) 244-5412.

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