For a long time now, when it comes to search engines, Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) has been the king of the hill, and a new survey shows that Google extended its lead once again during August, taking valuable traffic away from its main competitors Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT).According to comScore, Google increased its dominance during August by attracting 63% of all search engine traffic, up from 61.9% during the month of July. comScore's data was based on 11.7 billion searches in the month, and shows that Yahoo and Microsoft are still unable to tap into the valuable search engine traffic that Google maintains.
Yahoo scored a very distant second place, with 19.6% of all search engine traffic. This was a drop of 0.9% from its July figures. Third place goes to Microsoft, who scored 8.3% of search engine traffic during the month, down 0.6% from the previous month.
While Microsoft and Yahoo continue to lose ground to the search engine giant, not every portal is experiencing the same trend. Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) owned AOL was able to make up a little ground in August, rising to 4.3%, up from 4.2% in July. The Ask Network also moved slightly higher, lifting its share of search engine traffic from 4.3% up to 4.8% during the month.
Shares of Google have been rising on the day following the latest traffic numbers, with shares of the stock picking up 1.95% to 447.50, up $8.42 on the day.
Michael Fowlkes has worked as a stock trader for seven years and spent the last four years working as an analyst for the online investment advisory service Investor's Observer.
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