Yahoo Again Cuts Into Google's Share Of Search Market

Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO) continued to boost its slice of the Web-search market, taking market share from sector giant Google Inc. (GOOG) again in August, according to data released by an industry researcher.

According to monthly data from comScore Inc. (SCOR), Google still sat comfortably atop Web-search rankings, garnering 65.4% of U.S. core searches, down 0.4 percentage points from July. Meanwhile, Yahoo added 0.3 percentage points to its share of the market, bringing it to 17.1%. Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT) Bing engine added 0.1 percentage point to its cut of the market, bringing its share to 17.1%.

Overall, users made nearly 15.7 billion searches in August.

ComScore has shifted how it reports its data after Yahoo's "contextual searches" skewed results in June. While comScore's definition of a search included the traditional search-box query type of searches, it also included some automatic search results that pop up without a user entering a specific query. Now, the group is measuring U.S. explicit core searches, which exclude contextual searches that don't reflect any intent by users