comScore and Nielsen/NetRatings issued their monthly search engine rankings, again with some notable differences between their respective numbers.
According to the comScore Networks monthly qSearch analysis of competitive search engines, in October Google sites led with 3.1 billion search queries performed (45.4 percent share of searches); similarly, according to the Nielsen/NetRatings MegaView Search numbers (pdf), Google accounted for 3.0 billion queries (and 49.6 percent of all searches).
However, for second place, comScore had Yahoo sites with 1.9 billion searches (a 28.2 percent share), whereas NetRatings counted 1.5 billion searches for Yahoo and assigned it a 23.9 percent share. For third place, comScore had searches at MSN-Microsoft totaling 796 million (11.7 percent), whereas NetRatings placed the number of searches for MSN/Windows Live at 539 million and 8.8 percent share.
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The two research firms disagreed on the rank order of the next two-largest engines, the Ask network and Time Warner/AOL. comScore ranked Ask fourth with 392 million searches (5.8 percent) and Time Warner fifth with 366 million (5.4 percent), whereas Nielsen/NetRatings ranked AOL fourth with 375 million (6.2 percent) and Ask.com fifth with 168 million (2.8 percent).
Americans conducted 6.8 billion searches online in October, up 3 percent from September and 33 percent from Oct. 2005, according to comScore.
