Facebook’s U.S. search queries grew 48 percent in March, bringing the company to 4.2 percent market share, according to comScore data that’s due out this afternoon but has already been distributed by Citi Investment Research. At 4.2 percent of searches, Facebook now has a greater share than the search engine Ask, at 3.8 percent, and the long-time portal AOL, at 2.5 percent. And this is coming off of a February when Facebook redesigned its home page to more prominently feature search and saw an immediate 10 percent jump in search queries.
Microsoft’s Bing, which powers Facebook’s web search, is also on the rise, with 11.7 percent market share a couple tenths above February. Yahoo grew for the first time since Bing was introduced — to 16.9 percent market share — but is still on a overall downward slope for the year. Meanwhile, Google had 65.1 percent market share in March, down just a few tenths from March.
Expect this trend to continue. As we wrote last month:
Understanding information through a social lens can be incredibly useful. Not to mention, half of Facebook’s 400 million users log in every day, so they will likely become accustomed to searching through the site where they live on the web.
Related content from GigaOM Pro:
Why Google Should Fear the Social Web
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Post and thumbnail photos courtesy Flickr user boxchain.
