Tuesday, Aug 21, 2007    Text size: 

According to comScore’s data, Google captured 55.2 percent of the July search market, up .03 percent from June. Second in the rankings was Yahoo, with 23.5 percent, followed by Microsoft (12.3 percent), Ask.com (4.7 percent) and the Time Warner network (4.4 percent).

In its press release announcing the market share results, comScore said that it has altered its ranking criteria from past reporting periods, as the rankings for the major search engines “now include the partner searches and cross-channel searches in the total for each property.”

In addition to market share, comScore also published its findings concerning the total number of search queries handled by each major network. Google led the pack with more than 5.45 billion searches in July, up from 5.33 billion in June.

The only major search property that did not see an increase in its total number of searches in July was the Time Warner network, which dropped from 440 million searches in June to 436 million in July.

The change in comScore’s search metrics has been dubbed “qSearch 2.0” by the company, which said that changes in consumer behavior have necessitated a change in the way the search market is measured.

“With the continued evolution of the search market, it has become clear there is a need to expand the way we think about search,” said James Lamberti, senior vice president of search solutions for comScore. “qSearch 2.0 gives the most comprehensive and accurate view of the entire search market by including all forms of search that are being monetized currently or could be monetized in the future.”

The data reported under qSearch 2.0 will now provide clients of the company to differentiate search traffic that originates from a typical text box on a search engine portal from other manners of search, like auto-searches resulting from information typed into a browser’s address bar, toolbar searches and searches executed from sites partnered with the major search engines.

According to comScore, the company’s search metrics are based on a “massive, global cross-section of more than 2 million consumers who have given comScore permission to confidentially capture their browsing and transaction behavior, including online and offline purchasing.”