Google Continues to Expand Search Dominance

According to comScore, total U.S. search queries in the U.S. were up 11.8% from October, and 26% year over year. Results from comScore shows further evidence that Google continues to tighten its grip on the U.S. search market:

• Google - 58.5%, up from 57% one month earlier, and 49% one year ago.
• Yahoo - 22.9% share in October, down from 23.7% in September, and 28.7% a year ago.
• Microsoft - 9.7% share, down from 10.3% a month ago, and 11% a year ago.
• AOL - 4.2%, down from 4.3% a month ago, and 6.2% a year ago.
• Ask.com - 4.7% share, flat with a month ago, but down from 5.2% a year ago, despite heavy advertising.

Internationally, Google is even stronger:

• Google - 69.4% share, down from 69.8% a month ago.
• Yahoo - 14.4% share, down from 14.9%.
• Microsoft - 2.5% share, down from 2.6%
• AOL - flat at 0.4%.
• Ask.com - flat at 0.2%.
• Baidu - 8.8% share, up from 7.7%
• Naver.com had 4.4% share, up from 4.3%.

Some have raised concerns that Google's dominant market share means that there is less upside in the future. However, Google continues to pursue additional channels for its search technology, such as mobile devices. I would be more concerned for a growth slowdown if the pie was not increasing. But I believe that search and on-line advertising will continue to expand for the foreseeable future.

Even without taking additional market share there is growth in the U.S. and internationally. Take the year over year increase in searches for the U.S. of 26%. Even without increasing market share, or finding new channels for search advertising, the size of the market expanded dramatically over the past year.

Despite these types of concerns, last week the first $900 price target for Google was issued by UBS. Google made a strong move up to $660 on Wednesday in a terrible tape for the market as a whole.

Disclosure: at the time of this posting the author was long GOOG, MSFT and BIDU.