The 3 major US search providers persisted their long-term dominance of the online search market in May 2010, as per the data from The Nielsen Company.

In total, Americans carried out 9.25 billion online queries in May 2010.

3 Companies Take 90% of Market

Only 3 companies, Google Search, Yahoo Search, and MSN/Windows Live/Bing Search, accounted for a little more than 90% of all US queries for the period of May 2010. Google held a 65.1% share of the search industry with 6 billion searches, its share flat from the preceding month, whilst Yahoo came in 2nd with 13.8% market share and 1.27 billion searches, sufficient to increase its share by 0.3 percentage points.

MSN/Windows Live/Bing closely trailed Yahoo with about 2 billion queries and 13% market share (up 0.1 percentage points from April 2010). The fourth-ranked provider, AOL Search, accounted for simply about 191.2 million searches and 2.1% market share (down 0.4 percentage points).

Market Stays the Same

In general, the US search market exhibited minimal fluctuation between April and May 2010. AOL lost the most percentage points from its April market share figure and Yahoo gained the most. 4 of the top 10 providers, including Google, retained flat market share compared to the prior month.

comScore Demonstrates Very Much The Same Results

comScore generated similar results in its tracking of the May 2010 US search market, using different metrics. comScore’s core search results from May 2010 show that Google Sites led the US core search market in May with 63.7% of the searches conducted, down 0.7 percentage points from 64.4% in April.

Meanwhile, Yahoo Sites managed the number two spot with 18.3% of all core searches, up 0.6 percentage points from 17.7% from the previous month. Microsoft sites continued to be in third place with 12.1% of all core searches, a 0.3 percentage point boost from 11.8% in April. comScore tracked 15.93 billion core searches in May 2010.