News
        
        Microsoft Passes Yahoo for First Time in Search
        
        
        
			- By Chris Paoli
- January 12, 2012
Microsoft's U.S. Internet search market share has passed Yahoo's for the first time, according to  market analysis by   comScore. The companies are now No. 2 and No. 3, respectively, behind  market leader Google.
Yahoo's search engine claimed  14.5 percent of the U.S. market in December, a drop of 0.6 percentage points from its November market share. At the same time, Microsoft captured 15.1 percent  of the search engine market in December, increasing by 0.1 percentage points since November.
 According to comScore, Microsoft's   search sites received 2.75  billion explicit core search queries, compared to   Yahoo's 2.64 billion search requests. comScore  defines an explicit core   search as any search total that "excludes contextually driven   searches that  do not reflect specific user intent to interact with the   search results."
The two companies' role reversal can be attributed to the 2009  deal that provided Yahoo with Bing search engine  technology.
While Microsoft's move to second place in the U.S. search  market may   seem like a victory, it still lost ground to  first-place Google    for the month, which increased its market share for the month by 0.5 percentage points, finishing December with 65.9 percent (over 12 billion   search requests).
However, for Microsoft, and specifically its Bing engine,  which lost  an estimated $494 million in operating costs in the first fiscal quarter of  2012,   the gap between it and Google has closed significantly since the    2009 deal with Yahoo: Google had 85 percent of the search engine market    at  that time.
  
    | Search Company | Core Search Share (Nov. 2011) | Core Search Share (Dec. 2011) | 
  
    | Google | 65.4% | 65.9% | 
  
    | Microsoft | 15.0% | 15.1% | 
  
    | Yahoo | 15.1% | 14.5% | 
  
    | Ask Network | 2.9% | 2.9% | 
  
    | AOL | 1.6% | 1.6% | 
Figures courtesy of comScore.