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%
