Search Market Share In October 2015 Looks A Lot Like It Did In October 2008

October desktop search data from comScore came out late Friday afternoon. Google appears to have “stabilized” at roughly 64 percent market share, while Bing and Yahoo are also mostly unchanged from September.

Search market share was in nearly the same place in October 2008. Google controlled roughly 64 percent of search query volume and the number two site had 20 percent. Of course that number two player was Yahoo at the time. Today it’s Bing/Microsoft. In addition, AOL and Ask had a larger share of search seven years ago, which has largely be transferred “up market.”

But back in 2008 mobile search was negligible.

The most interesting thing about this month’s data is the increase in query volume. There was 2 percent growth in desktop search volume vs. September. As a practical matter that represented roughly 340 million more monthly search queries. From a paid-search perspective that means millions of dollars in the aggregate — perhaps as much as $100 million.

The charts and data above don’t feature mobile search volumes, which Google has said exceed PC queries. Therefore, at least where Google is concerned, there are at least 11 billion more monthly search queries out there that these charts don’t capture. Search is now a much larger pie than it was a few years ago.

It’s time for comScore to start reporting mobile search queries along with PC search volumes. The desktop-only data now represents a very incomplete picture of what’s going on out there in search engine land.

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