2012’s Mind-Blowing Internet Statistics

In a sign of the mobile-centric times, desktop Web search declined in September for the first time since Macquarie Group began tracking it in 2006.

ComScore data for September 2012 showed that searches declined 4 percent year over year. Growth rates in search have been slowing for almost a year. The increasing number of mobile searches appears to be the biggest reason for the decline, Macquarie analysts said in their report.

Non-traditional search engines also are on the rise.We might search for clothes on Fab.com instead of Google,or airfares on Hipmunk, or a friend’s e-mail address on Facebook.

Collectively, all those trends point to a long, slow decline for traditional desktop search. And it’s a reason why companies like Google and Microsoft are investing heavily in mobile search applications.

Google remains the No. 1 search engine, claiming 66.7 percent market share. Microsoft’s Bing hit an all-time high of 15.9 percent share, and has either grown or retained its share for 29 consecutive months. The big loser appears to be Yahoo, where searches were down 25 percent on the year. Its market share has declined 3.2 percent in the last year, to 12.2 percent.

—More info: www.macquarie.com

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