Google sees slight drop in search market share

Yahoo was able to substantially increase its search market share during July, while Google saw its share dropping for the first in several months, according to a report released by market research firm Nielsen Netratings. Yahoo increased its market share from 23.0% in June to 23.8% in July. Google dropped from 49.4% in June - its highest share ever - to 49.2% in July. Nielsen estimates that about 2.78 billion searches were run through Google, while Yahoo was used for 1.35 billion.

Most other large search engines gave up market share - MSN dropped from 10.3 to 9.6% (542 million searches) and AOL saw a decline from 6.9 million to 6.3% (355 million searches). Ask.com, ranked fifth, was able to gain 0.3 market share points to 2.6% with a growth from 126 million to 149 million searches.