Did search peak in the US last year?

According to figures released by Nielsen, as of July the US search market stood at a staggering 8,856,795,000 searches. Yet though this figure demonstrates the huge audience for search engine marketing - at the very least indicative of millions of impressions for PPC ads – it also demonstrates a surprising trend; a year-on-year decline in search use in the US from July 2009.

Nielsen’s figures show that the number of searches conducted in the US market has dropped by 16% over the past year, from 10.5bn to 8.8bn last month. As might be expected, this has resulted in a similar decrease in the amount of searches made on each of the top five search engines listed by Nielsen – except for Bing and Ask.com.

Whilst Google (-17%), Yahoo! Search (-30%) and AOL (-47%) have seen the overall drop in the total number of searches affect their traffic, Bing has seen an impressive 28% increase in its share even when the Window Live/MSN figures are taken into account. Meanwhile, Ask – who accounts for just 189,243,000 searches – has made an impressive 4% increase, especially in comparison with its closest competitor AOL.

Still, the overall numbers are less significant for search engine marketing revenue than a search engine’s share of the market. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft still account for 92.1% of all searches in the US, whilst Google retains a 64.2% dominant share, just -1% from its 2009 standing.

However as the previous figures might suggest, Bing has made a significant increase on its previous standings – a 51% year on year growth in its share of the search market to 13.6% today. Coupled with Yahoo’s -17% year-on-year change to 14.3%, the difference between the two companies has dropped from 7.1% to only 0.7%.

These figures don’t strictly indicate a drop in the overall number of impressions to paid search engine marketing though. Nielsen’s data only incorporates core search, rather than contextual searches – where users are linked to SERPs from a web page, rather than making their own search query – which still display PPC ads. It’s also unclear whether or not these figures include searches made by mobile devices, a substantial and rapidly growing market in the US.