YouTube Search Accounts for Nearly 28% of All Google Searches

A little over a year ago, comScore's US Search Rankings Report for Dec. 2008 showed that YouTube for the first time, could be thought of as the second largest search engine next to Google with 2,905,000,000 total search queries that month. According to comScore's December 2009 US Search Rankings Report published last week, YouTube searches grew 35% year over year to more than 3.9 billion search queries. 

In fact, YouTube not only had 50% more searches than Yahoo web search (3.918B vs 2.629B) and 180% more searches than Bing (3.918B vs 1.399B), but the number of searches at the online video giant made up almost 28% (27.95) of the total searches on Google sites for Dec. 2009.

Searching as a Means for Video Discovery

Is there any question that people are accustomed to search as a means for video discovery?  I hope not.  When you combined the above information with the notion that 23% of YouTube's total visits for December (130.3Million according to compete.com) originated from Google search , it is clear that video search is here to stay.

comScore Search Statistics for December 2009

Here is the data as released from comScore for December 2009:

• 22.3 billion expanded search queries in the U.S.
• Google Sites (including YouTube) accounted for 65.7% of all searches.
• Microsoft Sites grabbed 10.7% market share.

Other notable findings:

• Bing experienced large growth during the month with a 6-percent increase
• eBay and Amazon had a great month which can be attributed to retail search activity for the holiday season.
• YouTube searches were only up 1% month over month.  Still, 1% is equal to an increase of 45 million searches.

Go YouTube!