Total Core Searches Grow By 3% In April From March - ComScore

Americans conducted 14.8B core searches in April, 3% improvement from March, as Google's sites continued to dominate search market, according to comScore Inc. Some 64% of searches conducted in the month of April were on Google sites, with Yahoo & Microsoft having market share of 20.4% and 8.2%, respectively. IAC/Interactive's Ask network & Time Warner's AOL rounded out the top 5, each with results under 5%. Google accounted for 9.5B core searches in April, followed by Yahoo with 3B and Microsoft sites with 1.2B. Google's core search growth was 4%, with Yahoo up 2% & Microsoft up 1% from March levels. Ask Network posted a 3% rise while AOL posted a 6% decline. Meanwhile, in comScore's analysis of Web sites where search activity is observed, expanded searches posted a 5% gain to 22.1B from March. Google again led with 13B searches, with Yahoo and Microsoft at 3.2B & 1.3B, respectively. For friend networking sites, News Corp.'s MySpace sites posted 15% growth to 658M search queries & Facebook had a 28% fall to 176M. MySpace is owned by News Corp. In e-commerce, Amazon.com sites down 2% to 188M. EBay search queries grew 20%. Privately-held Craigslist's search queries grew 4% to 583M.