comScore released its qSearch Internet Yellow Page (IYP) search rankings for Q1, which revealed that Yellow Book Network was the fastest growing property with an 85% gain in searches vs. Q1 2006, while Yahoo! Sites was the market leader, accounting for 22.4% of IYP searches.
Growth in the overall IYP U.S. search market in Q1 2007 has been driven by an increasing number of searchers, with the total number of unique IYP searchers growing by 21%. However, the total number of IYP searches conducted rose by a modest 5% during that time-frame, indicating that lighter searchers have entered the market. Nonetheless, Yellow Book Network and Yellowpages Network both realized increases of at least 80% in the number of search queries conducted. The surge in search volume at Yellow Book Network can largely be attributed to a major national TV campaign, as well as strategic partnerships. Yellowpages Network achieved growth primarily as the result of the inclusion of Switchboard.com traffic in December 2006 and did not contribute significantly to IYP search market growth.
For the fifth consecutive quarter Yahoo! has led in IYP search share, accounting for 22.4% of IYP searches in Q1 2007. Idearc Media ranked second with a 19.6% share, followed by Yellowpages Network with 17.6% and Google Sites with 12.1%. Yellowpages Network posted the biggest share gain in Q1 2007 with an increase of 7.3 share points, followed by Yellow Book Network with a gain of 2.1 points.
Idearc Media led the competition in IYP search engagement, as measured by both searches per searcher (5.0) and result pages per searcher (9.7), driven primarily by activity on its Superpages.com site. Yahoo! Sites ranked second in searches per searcher with 4.6, followed by Yellowpages Network with 4.4. In terms of search results pages per searcher, Yellowpages Network ranked second with 9.4, while Yahoo! Sites rounded out the top three with 8.8.
