Mountain View (CA) – Comscore as well as Nielsen Netratings estimated Google’s U.S. search engine market at more than 60% in July. While the market research firms have come up with substantially different numbers for their July report, both agree that Google now runs more than three times the numbers of searches of its closest rival and more than twice the searches of Yahoo and Microsoft combined.   

Comscore and Nielsen Netratings posted market share numbers for Google at greater than 60% for the second time this year. However, while the April result could have been considered as a blip, the July result fits the pattern of Google chipping away market share from its rivals, bit by bit.

Nielsen Netratings estimates that Google was used for 60.2% or more than 4.8 billion of 8.0 billion searches started by U.S. users during the month of July. Comcast came up with a 61.9% share for Google and 7.3 billion searches of a total of a total of 11.8 billion. Both Yahoo and Microsoft keep losing ground: Nielsen puts the two companies at 17.4% and 11.9%, Comscore at 20.5% and 8.9%.

Google’s market share gains appear to have accelerated in 2008, with much stronger growth than in previous years. According to Nielsen Netratings, Google had a market share of 46.2% in July 2005, 49.2% in July 2006 and 53.3% in July 2007. Over the past year, Google was able to increase its market share by almost seven percentage points – more than in any other 12-month period before. In comparison, Nielsen Netratings listed Yahoo with a share of 20.1% and Microsoft at 13.6%, which means that Yahoo lost 2.7 percentage points and Microsoft 1.7 points of market share since then.

At least numbers indicate that an acquisition of Yahoo could have been a critical step for Microsoft to close a portion of the gap with Google, even if that would have still left Google with twice the market share in an ideal case. Google appears to be practically invincible these days.

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