The American internet analytics company comScore has published statistics for December 2015 in relation to desktop search rankings, which are showing an interesting but not surprising trend. Whilst Bing’s figures for desktop searches were up a little on the previous month of November 2015, other major search engines have lost ground. Google especially has slightly lost ground, with a decreased market share and volume compared to around 12 months earlier. Back, then, the search engine giant enjoyed a share of 65.4%, compared to Bing, which then stood at 19.7%. Google currently stands at 63.8%, whilst Bing is now enjoying a 21.1% share of desktop searches. However, according to comScore, when looking at the total market share and taking into account ‘powered by searches’, Google is still the main player, taking up 64.8% of the U.S. search query volume, while Bing powered 32.2% of organic searches. The better news for Google is that the latest figures don’t contain the statistics for internet searches carried out on mobile devices, which are steadily growing in popularity and becoming the preferred medium for many who regularly browse the web. . Recent data released illustrates how searches using desktops are something of a dead duck at the moment and are down 1.2 billion in total compared to just over 12 months ago! This is largely due to a significant decline in Google searches being carried out on desktops, which have been consumed by mobile use. Mobile search volumes aren’t reflected in the latest statistics, but it’s thought they’re probably quite significant for Google, although not as big for Yahoo and Bing. Google have their finger on the pulse, acknowledging recently that in 2015, mobile searches overtook those carried out on a PC. This applies not just to the U.S. but also in many other countries across the world, including Japan. With Google’s added knowledge, it’s likely to that the latest statistics released by comScore for Google could probably be doubled, if mobile searches were taken into account. It’s really time for comScore as a world-leading internet technology company to start providing a combined view of both PC and mobile search volumes, since PC data alone just gives an imbalanced view of the search market in the US. So, it’s official – smartphones have overtaken laptops and desktop computers as internet users’ number one device, with people spending a minimum of several hours every day online on their smartphones. This is double the time spent on desktops and laptops. 4G is greatly helping to promote this trend, which isn’t likely to see any slowdown in the future.
27th January 2016
