ComScore: YouTube Now 25 Percent Of All Google Searches .

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ComScore: YouTube Now 25 Percent Of All Google Searches

by Erick Schonfeld on December 18, 2008

Video search on YouTube accounts for a quarter of all Google search queries in the U.S., according to the latest search engine numbers from comScore. Its monthly qSearch report, which was released on Thursday night, breaks out the number of searches conducted on YouTube. If it were a standalone site, YouTube would be the second largest search engine after Google. More searches are done through YouTube than through Yahoo, which has been the case for the past few months.

Christa Quarles, an analyst at Thomas Weisel Partners, writes in a report:

YouTube continues to be a standout contributor for Google generating 2.73bn searches in the U.S., up 8.5% from 2.52bn last month and up 114% from 1.28bn in November 2007. YouTube currently represents 25.4% of U.S. Google site searches compared with 17.4% in November 2007 and is larger than all of Yahoo based on total U.S. queries in November.

The comScore numbers show healthy growth in core search activity as well (stripping out video search, map search, etc), especially for Google. Plain-vanilla search for Google grew 32.3 percent annually, compared to a 29.6 percent growth rate in October. Perhaps all of that holiday bargain hunting is helping.

Google’s core search market share (which does not include YouTube) edged up 0.4 percent fromOctober to 63.5 percent (and up 5.9 percent year-over-year).

Yahoo’s market share of core search queries was 20.4 percent (down 0.1 percent from October, and down 2 percent year-over-year) and Microsoft’s was 8.3 percent (down 0.2 percent month-over-month, and down 1.5 percent year-over-year). See the tables below.