Yahoo's Search Share Continues To Drop Sharply
Analyst Ben Schachter at Macquarie Research distributed the raw numbers in a report last night:
- GOOG - GOOG queries increased 6% y/y in February. GOOG's share of searches in February was 67.5%, compared with 67.0% in January 2013 and 66.4% in February 2012.
- YHOO - YHOO queries decreased 13% y/y in February. YHOO's share of searches in February was 11.6%, compared with 12.1% in January 2013 and 13.8% in February 2012.
- Bing - Bing queries increased 14% y/y in February. Bing's share of searches in February was 16.7%, compared with 16.5% in January 2013 and 15.3% in February 2012.
- AOL - AOL queries increased 15% y/y in February. AOL's share of searches in February was 1.7%, compared with 1.7% in January 2013 and 1.5% in February 2012.
- Ask - Ask queries decreased 11% y/y in February. Ask's share of searches in February was 2.6%, compared with 2.8% in January 2013 and 3.0% in February 2012.
As you can see, Yahoo's queries dropped the most out of all the search engines. And its share loss was greater than Ask.
This is bad news for new CEO Marissa Mayer. Yahoo's search business was 38% of the company's revenue. And it was likely highly profitable since Yahoo has offloaded a lot of the search business to Microsoft.
From Microsoft's perspective, this report isn't great news, either.
It's pouring billions into Bing, but Google is at an all time high and it looks like Bing is just taking share from its partner, Yahoo.