Google (Nasdaq:GOOG) Search Driven by Travel, Finance, and Retail Verticals

Google (Nasdaq:GOOG) search continues to perform strongly, led by travel, finance, and retail verticals.

According to comScore, Google gained market share, now accounting for 66.3 percent of domestic search. Microsoft's Bing also increased, while Yahoo's search fell.

Barclays (NYSE:BCS) noted, "comScore's October search data out yesterday indicates that Google gained 20 bps of share M/M, while Yahoo! (Nasdaq:YHOO) lost 30 bps M/M and Bing (Nasdaq:MSFT) gained - 40 bps. This is the first full month of share data since Google Instant went live and the second straight monthly share gain for Google. Google's domestic query share is now 66.3% and query growth aecelerated slightly to +17.8% Y/Y, Yahoo!'s share is now at 16.5% as query growth reaccelerated to +6.8% Y/Y, and Bing's share is 11.5% as queries reaccelerated slightly to +40.9% Y/Y. Our checks indicate that the domestic search market continues to perform well with particular strength across Travel, Finance, and Retail verticals. With the recent weakness in Google shares-down 7% since its recent high on 11/08 vs. the S&P -4%- we reiterate our Overweight rating on what we believe is a strengthening search ad market into the holidays, continued growth in paid clicks, CPC growth, and solid share gains."

Google closed Thursday at $596.56, rising by $13.01, or 2.23 percent. Barclays maintains their "Overweight" rating on Google.