Back to school boosts search numbers

The summer travel season is over and the holiday shopping season is yet to fully hit. Still, in September search outpaced previous records set by pulling in more than 7.5 billion search queries.

by Kristina Knight

That is an increase of nearly 4.5% over August searches.

The majority were, once again, performed on search giant Google's platform. According to Compete, Inc. Google logged in 5.2 billion search queries, giving Google a 67% market share. Yahoo was the closest competitor, accounting for nearly 1.5 billion searches. Yahoo was basically flat, though, pulling in 19% market share, the same as the company saw in August. Microsoft's Live Search was next with 717 million search queries, a 9% market share and Ask.com accounted for 277 million searches, a 3% market share.

Compete estimates that many search queries were performed by students looking up information for school projects. This is quite likely as the US fall school session got fully underway in September.

In a related report, Nielsen//Netratings found that Google and Microsoft sites were the top two visited website companies in September. Just over 118 million unique users signed on to Google and about 117 million uniques signed on to Microsoft sites. Yahoo followed with 109 million unique users; Time Warner saw 102 million uniques sign on.