comScore Data for the United States shows search volume down 2.5% y/y. You can view the monthly Search Query Volume data for the last 12 months for Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask and Aol.
For Google, Explicit search growth improved down 1% y/y from down 2% y/y in September. October is the second month of negative y/y explicit search query data for Google. Kindly note that Google Places and Google mobile searches are not reflected in comScore search data and that we expect Google’s continued monetization improvements (higher paid clicks per query) to drive PC revenue growth above PC query growth.
For Yahoo, October is the tenth consecutive month of negative y/y explicit search query data. Searcher penetration was up 20bp m/m to 45.5% and explicit search share was flat m/m at 12.2%. As a reminder, Yahoo reported flat queries in 3Q, so ComScore is likely missing some queries for Yahoo.
Explicit search share for Bing was up 10bp m/m at 16.0%, and has increased 120bp in the past year. A few SEMs have highlighted that Bing had material revenue-per-search improvement in Q3.
Unfortunately we do not have comScore mobile query data to see the full picture for query growth; we note that some search advertisers (SEMs) are estimating that mobile queries have grown to represent over 15% of total queries as they compile data form various sources and that is the ballpark figure now.
