December 2008 Search Rankings – Search Increased 3% Overall.

January 17, 2009 by Pablo Palatnik

I have some surprising news to report, Google has more than half of all searches online! I know right, weird. According to the new report released by ComScore in its latest press release:

“Google Sites led the U.S. core search market in December with 63.5 percent of the searches conducted, unchanged from November, followed by Yahoo! Sites (20.5 percent), Microsoft Sites (8.3 percent), Ask Network (3.9 percent), and AOL LLC (3.8 percent).”

It’s notable to see that Ask.com and Microsoft aren’t that far apart in monthly searches which is why you see so much talks about a Microsoft and Yahoo deal which only then ,could become a real competition in the search market. AOL doesn’t have a real bad end of the deal if you think about it. Yes, maybe early in its existence AOL was big on search when we had AOL, AltaVista and the old school ones but after all this time in its decline still holds 4% of all searches.

Another key finding in this report:

“Americans conducted 12.7 billion searches at the core search engines, up 3 percent from November. Google Sites handled 8 billion core searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.6 billion and Microsoft Sites with 1.1 billion.”

It’s no surprise search went up as Americans flooded online for Cyber Monday, and the holiday shopping season which is strongest in December.

Overall, positive news in the sense that if search increases, we can have a positive outlook on business.