Google now controls more than 50% of search requests from Americans

Chicago (IL) – Google is steadily expanding its search engine market share and May was the first month in which both Comscore and Nielsen Netratings found that the company now runs more U.S. based searches than all other major search engines combined.

Nielsen Netratings had listed Google with more than 50% of market share since December 2006, when the firm estimated that the search engine ran about 50.8% of all searches. Comscore’s estimates for Google typically have been substantially lower, but hit 50.7% for May 2007, which marked the first time that both major Internet ratings firms agree that Google runs more than half of all search requests from Americans.

Nielsen believes that 7.16 billion search queries were requested by Americans during the month of May, with Google holding a 56.3% share, which translates into 4.03 billion searches - up from 2.8 billion one year ago. According to Nielsen, Google has been adding market share every month, which climbed from 49.1% in May 2006 to 55.2% in April 2007 and to the new record level this month.

Yahoo shows quite the opposite, surrendering share every month. The company was ranked with a 22.9% share in May 2006 and 21.5% in May 2007. Microsoft (MSN), according to Nielsen, lost even more market share, dropping from 10.6% to 8.4% in the same time frame.

Comscore has found that a slightly higher number of searches was conducted in May (7.6 billion) and that Google was the target of lightly less than what Nielsen came up with (3.9 billion searches). Comscore estimates Google at a 50.7% market share, up from 44.1% one year ago.

The company also agrees that there have been market share losses at Yahoo (down from 27.9% to 26.4%) and MSN (down from 12.9% to 10.3%), but ranks both search engines with a higher market share than Nielsen Netratings.