Whatever its originality, early numbers from qSearch, which include data collected since the beginning of the year, confirm what industry watchers have suspected for some time: Google leads the pack among search sites, with Yahoo -- which uses Google's engine to produce search results for Yahoo sites -- close behind. Google.com accounts for 33 percent of all queries by English-speaking searchers, ComScore said. In the United States alone, Yahoo leads with 26 percent of the approximately 790 million searches performed in the states during the time covered by the qSearch report. "We've seen (Google) move up to the No. 1 position in the last 12 months, based on worldwide activity," said Lamberti. "But Yahoo is much stronger domestically than people understood before our data became available." ComScore attributed Yahoo's strength in the United States to its specialised sites like Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Yellow Pages, where more than half of Yahoo queries took place. ComScore's first report offered good news for second- and third-tier search sites. Dogpile, a "meta search engine" that queries a range of other engines, had a "visitor-to-searcher" conversion rate -- or the percentage of people who visit a site and then end up searching there -- of 83 percent. Ask Jeeves, a so-called natural language query engine, scored a 75 percent conversion rate. The ComScore data also suggest that search competitors are divvying up the market according to work and home searching. For people querying engines at work, Google and Yahoo are virtually tied, at 27 percent and 26 percent of the market, respectively. AOL and Yahoo tie with 25 percent each for the at-home search market. Among search providers that offer paid listings, Google shares the top spot with competitor Overture in terms of the exposure those paid results get. Sites with Overture paid results -- including Yahoo, MSN, InfoSpace and AltaVista -- took a total of 47 percent of all queries made in the first month of the year. In that time, sites with Google paid results -- which include AOL, InfoSpace, Ask Jeeves, and Google itself -- accounted for the same share.
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