Yahoo Improves Search Market Share in December

With all that shopping going on in December, it should come as no surprise that Search Engine traffic was down slightly (-3.9%) across the board during the month. After all, who can find time to goof around on the Internet when they are too busy doing last minute shopping?

Despite that drop, Yahoo! search traffic was actually up. In fact, according to a comScore report, they were the big winner for the month with a 0.5% increase in use and, since they dipped 0.4% in November, that basically put them back where they were in October with a 22.9% overall market share. However, Google is still the big dog with 58.4% share of the Search market. That translates to more than 5.5 billion (yes, billion) searches per month using Google. That number does not include searches performed on YouTube and other Google owned properties, which tracked an additional 1.5 billion results in December alone.

As you can imagine, search traffic on shopping sites climbed quite a bit in December. For example, Amazon sites logged 215 million searches, which was a better than 20% increase over their numbers in November. eBay was up 3.9% and Craigslist was up 6.3%.

Social networking sites saw a decline in use in December. My guess would be the fact that people were actually networking the old fashioned way – fact-to-face at parties. That means they were not spending as much time searching on Facebook (-14.3%) and MySpace (-19.9%). Plus, in many cases, people are accessing those sites while they are at work and, since most workers are using up their vacation time before the end of the year, they were not logging in each day.

At any rate, the numbers should be back to normal starting this month, but Google is still going to be on top.

Check out our Flash graphic in the far right column for a visual 🙂 .