Friday 10 February 2012

Yahoo's Search Traffic Is TANKING

The trend is clear: Yahoo's search traffic is on a steep decline.

For the second month in a row, Yahoo lost significant share of U.S. searches, according to ComScore, falling 0.4 points to 14.1%. It has now lost almost a full percentage point in the last two months, and more than two points since last August.

Google seems to have picked up most of its losses, and is now at 66.2% while Bing has been on a slow but upward trend and stands at 15.2%.

Although Bing powers Yahoo's search, Microsoft keeps all the money from search advertising on Bing, while Yahoo takes close to 90% of the ad money from searches on Yahoo. So this is bad news for Yahoo.

Also, the deal between Microsoft and Yahoo has done nothing to stop Google.

Note that these are explicit "core" search queries, where a user actually enters a term in a search box on one of the three sites. It does not include other actions that might throw up a search result. These results also neglect mobile search, and searches outside the U.S. -- two areas where Google is even more dominant.

Here are the numbers for the last year. Look at Yahoo's steep decline in red.

  Mar-11 Apr-11 May-11 Jun-11 Jul-11 Aug-11 Sep-11 Oct-11 Nov-11 Dec-11 Jan-12
Google 65.7 65.4 65.5 65.5 65.1 64.8 65.3 65.6 65.4 65.9 66.2
Bing 13.9 14.1 14.1 14.4 14.4 14.7 14.7 14.8 15.0 15.1 15.2
Yahoo 15.7 15.9 15.9 15.9 16.1 16.3 15.5 15.2 15.1 14.5 14.1

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