ComScore October 2010 Search Engine Rankings - Google Maintains Lead, Duh

Since we talk about SEO, I figured we should talk about the search engines so you know where to focus (Google) and where you can sort of skip (AOL). Now, I find it odd that this report from comScore is five times longer than the new Video Metrix which has just two charts in it and three paragraphs.

So Google has 66.3% of all searches conducted in October says comScore an increase of 0.2%. Does that mean Instant Search is working? If you're interested in how comScore is tracking this, you can read their lengthy and overly-wordy explanation. Or just read this, the comScore panel provides visibility into all events that a user is conducting and all the HTTP calls associated with the user's actions.

It seems like Google stole its added 0.2% from Yahoo, who was second with 16.5%, and Microsoft stole its extra 0.3% from Ask and AOL who, combined, lost the same amount.

comScore Explicit Core Search Share Report*
October 2010 vs. September 2010
Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations
Core Search Entity            Explicit Core Search Share (%)

                              Sep-10    Oct-10    Point Change
Total Explicit Core Search    100.0%    100.0%        N/A
Google Sites                   66.1%     66.3%        0.2
Yahoo! Sites                   16.7%     16.5%       -0.2
Microsoft Sites                11.2%     11.5%        0.3
Ask Network                     3.7%      3.6%       -0.1
AOL LLC Network                 2.3%      2.1%       -0.2

*"Explicit Core Search" excludes contextually driven searches that do not reflect specific user intent to interact with the search results.

Google pulled in 11B searches that's about 385 per second every second of the month. If you're not working on SEO for them...there's something wrong with you. Yahoo! grabbed 2.7B and Microsoft 1.9B. I guess that means that, if you're not doing Bing SEO, you should be. They have a great set of webmaster tools that they've really been working on expanding and I was amazed when I checked recently.

The other two? They almost totaled 1B searches.

­­comScore Explicit Core Search Query Report
October 2010 vs. September 2010
Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations
Core Search Entity            Explicit Core Search Queries (MM)

                              Sep-10    Oct-10    Percent Change
Total Explicit Core Search    16,021    16,622          4%
Google Sites                  10,593    11,025          4%
Yahoo! Sites                   2,682     2,735          2%
Microsoft Sites                1,791     1,919          7%
Ask Network                      593       598          1%
AOL LLC Network                  362       346         -4%

comScore Total Core Search Share Report*
October 2010 vs. September 2010
Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations
Core Search Entity    Total Core Search Share (%)

                       Sep-10    Oct-10    Point Change
Total Core Search     100.0%    100.0%        N/A
Google Sites           62.9%     64.3%        1.4
Yahoo! Sites           19.2%     18.5%       -0.7
Microsoft Sites        12.5%     12.1%       -0.4
Ask Network             3.4%      3.2%       -0.2
AOL LLC Network         2.0%      1.9%       -0.1

* "Total Core Search" is based on the five major search engines, including partner searches, cross-channel searches and contextual searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in these numbers.

Americans conducted 18.4 billion total core search queries in October with Google Sites leading with 11.8 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 3.4 billion and Microsoft Sites with 2.2 billion.

comScore Total Core Search Query Report
October 2010 vs. September 2010
Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations
Core Search Entity    Total Core Search Queries (MM)

                      Sep-10    Oct-10    Percent Change
Total Core Search     17,671    18,434          4%
Google Sites          11,119    11,846          7%
Yahoo! Sites           3,394     3,416          1%
Microsoft Sites        2,204     2,229          1%
Ask Network              593       598          1%
AOL LLC Network          362       346         -4%

So the lesson here is, be sure you're doing SEO for Google, Yahoo, Bing. They all have some nifty tools to help:

• Google Webmaster Tools
• Yahoo! Site Explorer
• Bing Webmaster Tools

I did some digging to see if I could find similar tools for the other two search engines.

• Ask crawler info (which says, No tools...bah. That's why they're fourth of five)
  
• AOL uses Google. So that's a two for one deal.

So really if you do proper Google SEO you get both them and AOL. Also Bing is powering Yahoo! so that really helps simplify our SEO efforts.

Image Photo: Alamy / Eric Carr