This week, desktop search rankings were released from comScore for the month of January. Bing and Ask gained a fraction of a point each, but otherwise there was almost no movement in the number gained from the previous month, according to Search Engine Land.
Total query volume was up slightly for the major search engines but was mostly flat. Desktop data is growing more and more obsolete because search is becoming increasingly mobile and fragmentary.
Google controlled 63.9% of U.S. search query volume, and Bing powered 33.1% of organic search on the desktop.
PC driven search queries were down by two billion overall, mostly attributed to a decline in queries on Google, having transferred over to mobile. Yahoo and Bing desktop queries, however, are up a little from two years ago.
Over the past three years, Bing has shown meaningful growth; Yahoo is flat; and Google, Ask, and Bing have all lost share. It is predicted that AOL will dip below 0.5% and Ask will approach 1%.
Last year, Google said that mobile queries surpassed PC search volumes in at least 10 countries, including the U.S., the U.K., and Japan. And, if comScore volume estimates are correct, Google’s total volume is probably at least 20 billion monthly searches in the U.S.
As these search engine giants contemplate the implications of this report, content producing companies and web developers also struggle to make adjustments to the growing mobile trend. Web search is still a powerful business tool — a study from OutBrain showed that search is the number one driver of traffic to content sites, beating social media sites by 300%. Mobile compatibly is gaining ground as a serious priority for online businesses.