Google dominates U.S. share stats in June: Bing up, Yahoo down

Pretty much as expected, Google continues to dominate the U.S. search market in June, while in second and third place respectively, Bing gains slightly and Yahoo dips from the previous month.

comScore figures released early by Macquarie analyst Ben Schachter --- via Business Insider --- shows Google retains the lead, while the gap between Bing and Yahoo widens slightly.

Here are the key stats:

• Google is up by 0.1 percent from 66.7 percent in May to 66.8 percent in June. 
• Bing is up by 0.2 percent from 15.4 percent in May to 15.6 percent in June. 
• Yahoo is down by 0.4 percent from 13.4 percent in May to 13 percent in June.

It's the same old story. Google has for years maintained its monopoly over the search market, despite a few algorithm changes along the way --- such as the most recent one to favour newer search results over older ones --- allowing for queries to pick up recent news reports along the way.

Bing remains in second place, but is far behind Google by nearly 50 percent of the U.S. search market. In January, Bing had breached the 15 percent U.S. market share mark; a crucial milestone for Microsoft. It's not often Microsoft comes in second place at anything, but in the search market it shows healthy competition. 

Yahoo took another tumble month-on-month. Year-to-date, Yahoo has lost more than 0.8 percent of the search market. 

Yahoo and Bing remain as separate search sites, but the underbelly of the engine itself remains the same --- Yahoo is powered by Bing --- in the same way Google powers AOL and Ask's search pages.

Microsoft continues to invest in Bing, but it must come as a disappointment to see that Google users are not defecting to Bing. Instead, it seems Yahoo search users are defecting to Google.