YouTube Continues Search Engine Domination – Up 31% YOY

Is anyone still wondering if search is important for video?  In November of last year, YouTube surpassed Yahoo for the first time in total U.S. search queries, making it the 2nd largest search engine in the U.S. next to only its owner, Google.  Ever since then, YouTube has continued to dominate the search space when you look at the total number of search queries.

Now, when you think about the fact that all of the searches on Youtube are users looking for video content in particular, there is no doubt that YouTube is THE largest video search/discovery destination.

This past month, October, 2009, there were a total of more than 3.7 Billion search queries on YouTube as measured by comScore.  This represents and increase of more than 31 percent year over year (vs 2,580,000.000 queries in Oct. 2008) and an increase of 7% over just last month.  Yahoo, although still the 3rd largest search engine, has now fallen more than 1 billion queries/mo behind YouTube.

Now for those of you that are interested in search beyond just video, Microsoft’s Bing product experienced the largest percentage growth of the top ten expanded search properties, experiencing an 8% increase in query volume (although this is a larger increase in terms of percentage, it still dwarfs YouTube when you consider query volume).  On a related note, last week on Wed., Microsoft unveiled a new Bing Video, a re-launch of MSN Video which pulls content from sites like YouTube, MSN, and Hulu.

Congrats Google, YouTube, and Bing…

Here is the data from ComScore‘s October 2009 US Search Rankings:

    comScore Expanded Search Query Report
    October 2009 vs. September 2009
    Total U.S. - Home/Work/University Locations
    Source: comScore qSearch
                                      Search Queries (MM)
                                                                  Percent
                                                                   Change
                                                                  Oct-09 vs.
    Expanded Search Entity              Sep-09       Oct-09        Sep-09
    Total Internet                       21,334       22,032           3%
    Google Sites                         12,839       13,505           5%
        Google                            9,373        9,788           4%
        YouTube/All Other                 3,466        3,717           7%
    Yahoo! Sites                          2,692        2,663          -1%
        Yahoo!                            2,668        2,639          -1%
        All Other                            24           24           0%
    Microsoft Sites                       1,352        1,457           8%
        Bing                              1,156        1,245           8%
        Microsoft/All Other                 196          212           8%
    Ask Network                             718          730           2%
        ASK.COM                             339          348           3%
        MyWebSearch.com/ All Other          379          382           1%
    AOL LLC                                 625          628           0%
        AOL Search Network                  366          359          -2%
        MapQuest/All Other                  259          269           4%
    eBay                                    621          617          -1%
    craigslist, inc.                        624          594          -5%
    Fox Interactive Media                   500          478          -4%
        MySpace Sites                       494          472          -4%
        All Other                             6            6           0%
    Facebook.com                            384          331         -14%
    Amazon Sites                            216          212          -2%