A lot of things happened in November related to web activities and which affected the volume of web searches. Election-related searches for must have taken the focus of web searches, but this was overshadowed by consumer related searches relating to Black Friday sales. These have all contributed in a way to the increase in Google’s search market share as the latest search volume data from Compete.com revealed.
Google manages to snag 70.8% search market share in November, up by 1.7% from October’s query volume.Yahoo on the other managed to get a .5% increase despite remaining below the 20% mark. Microsoft, Ask.com and AOL all managed to get percentage increases although not significant enough to elevate their search market share above 10%.
Also for the first time, Compete’s November search market report included sponsored search referrals. These are clicks made on sponsored links which results into revenues for the search engines. Sponsored search referrals are the bread and butter of search engines and plays an important role on a search engine’s life.
Interestingly, Google registered the biggest increase in sponsored search referrals for November as against sponsored search referrals for October of 2008 at 1.0% increase. Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com also managed to register a slight increase in their respective sponsored search referrals.
