Top U.S. Search Engines July 2012
If search engines received gold medals in a Search Engine Olympics, Google would capture the gold by dominating the greatest portion of the U.S. search market share.
When a small business owner decides where to invest online marketing dollars, it is imperative to analyze the market to maximize return on investment. One essential step is to determine where the “fish are swimming”. Statistics compiled by top Internet data collection experts who specialize in analyzing Internet behavior including Experian Hitwise US, Compete and Statcounter are gold mines for online marketers.
The top U.S. search engines for the four rolling weeks ending on August 11, 2012 were released by Experian Hitwise US. The company is an expert at collecting and delivering daily insights from the biggest global sample of Internet consumer behavior to help marketers. The results indicate that Google again captured the gold for the top share of U.S. with 1,527,530,284 visits or 66.03% of the search market share.
Leading Search Engines in the U.S. –
4 Rolling Weeks Ending August 11, 2012
The leading search engines in the U.S. for 4 rolling weeks ending on August 11, 2012 according to Experian Hitwise US are shown in the pie chart below by percentages of search share.
According the Compete’s July 2012 US Search Market Share Report, the market share of the major engines varied:
- Google Powered – 66.0%
- Google – 65.1%
- AOL – 0.9%
- Bing Powered – 34.0%
- Bing – 18.9%
- Yahoo! – 15.1%
Statcounter provided another view of U.S. search engine market share statistics for July 2012:
- Google – 80.28 %
- Bing – 9.5%
- Yahoo! – 8.22%
- AOL – 0.76%
- Ask Jeeves – 0.76%
- Other – 0.48%
Take Away
Although the data from the three reports vary, all three show that Google has the gold, with Bing capturing the silver and Yahoo!, the bronze. Small business owners and large corporations alike can use this data to determine where to invest valuable online marketing money to maximize the ROI.
What do you think? What is your favorite search engine? Which search engine do you award the gold?
Great information, Robin! There have been so many changes in search engines. Especially since social media came on the scene. There are SE’s not even listed here, there are probably now under “other”, that used to be huge. Thanks for the data that shows how they actually rank!
Thank you, Livvie! There have been so many changes in the search engines over the years. The one constant has been that Google has the gold medal for a number of years now. Appreciate your comment!