ComScore has just released its February search engine rankings data. And while there’s nothing new in terms of who is on top, who gained and who lost, what’s surprising about it is that among all the online properties where searches are conducted other than the five major search engines, Facebook gained a significant amount of searches in February.
Yes, it seems that more search activities are happening on Facebook lately. Facebook’s total search queries may not be that significant compared to the top search engines, but then it was only the online property which registered search query growth in February – amounting to 10% increase from its January search market share. Total searches conducted on Facebook was 436 million while Google got 13.5 billion search queries, Yahoo got 2.5 billion and Microsoft sites got 1.7 billion searches.
In terms of Core Searches though, Facebook is nowhere near the top five search engines where Google stays on top of the pact with 65.5% of searches, Yahoo with 16.8% and Microsoft Sites with 11.5%. Both Google and Microsoft had a slight increase in search market share in February with 0.1% and 0.2% respectively.
Total searches in the U.S. amounted to 14.5 billion which is a slight 5% decrease compare with data in January. Google Sites got 9.5 billion of these searches, Yahoo got 2.5 billion and Microsoft 1.7 billion.
