Just what is Google's market share?

36 or 85 percent?

[rencke]

This article in Business week [businessweek.com] puts the number of daily searches worldwide to 550 million. Google has stated for a long time on their Adwords start page that they have more than 200 million searches per day. At 200 million they would have a 36 percent share of the market.

But numerous discussions here at WebmasterWorld talk about market shares of 70 to 85%. So, which is it? Is Business Week wrong about 550 million or is it time for Google to update their Adwords page?

[Brett_Tabke]

> 550 million.

I think that number comes from Neilsen? aka: There are three types of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

> 200 million searches per day.

Close to that has been there since AdWords went online last year in February.

I think it's pretty clear that googe has 95% of the freely submitted searches on the web today and 80-90% of all searches.

[vitaplease]

250 million including their partners claimed half a year ago

[webmasterworld.com...]

for the rest - world wide - I'm in the 70%-80% camp (including partners)

[ogletree]

The reason for the high number is that they provide results for AOL and Yahoo. It may be just 36% for Google.com alone.

[rfgdxm1]

One thing that might be relevant here is that this is a big planet. What do the people in China use to search? And Japan? And Iran? Google may only be 50% of the market if all countries are considered.

[bcolflesh]

I agree - factor in Asian SEs, like Korea's Daum and G's marketshare is definitely below 70%.

[ciml]

> AOL and Yahoo

It may be different if you focus only on the US domestic market, but I find that for English language sites with good SE traffic and no PPC, *.AOL.* and *.Yahoo.* combined now give only 25% of the *.google.* volume.

[rfgdxm1]

>I agree - factor in Asian SEs, like Korea's Daum and G's marketshare is definitely below 70%.

Has anyone seen figures published for the number of daily searches these Asian SEs get? I'm guessing it would be a significant percentage of total world searches. These countries have large populations.

[Powdork]

What percentages oh Yahoo!'s searches are now powered by Google rather than inktomi or even inktoogle?

[mil2k]

I agree - factor in Asian SEs, like Korea's Daum and G's marketshare is definitely below 70%.

Can give you an Indian perspective over here. The market is only Google and Yahoo. And Yahoo gets most of it's visitors because of it's messenging service including SMS services. But Google is the only known search engine.

[RonPK]

I agree - factor in Asian SEs, like Korea's Daum and G's marketshare is definitely below 70%.

Daum appears to be using Google.

[GranPops]

From just six sites......six months..........all business sites
Google 92%
Yahoo 4%
MSN 1%
AOL 1%
Jeeves <1%
Others <1%

[edited by: GranPops at 7:29 pm (utc) on Oct. 13, 2003]

[bcolflesh]

Daum appears to be using Google.

You're right - the last time I looked at Daum they were not, but they've partnered since:

times.hankooki.com/lpage/tech/200303/kt2003031918031911800.htm

[Arnett]

What do the people in China use to search?

I'm told that the most popular Chinese search engines are sohu.com and 163.com. I've found no way to submit even my translated Chinese pages to them. Yahoo also has a Chinese operation in place. Google may have a share of those results and they may not.

[aleksl]

Google may have a good % of US searches, but not so in the world. From my site and 3-4 competitor sites in the same bi-lingual niche, Google and Yahoo are typically in top 5 (with Yahoo being between #3 and #5), with 3 other spots taken by language/country-specific search engines. On some sites Google is not even in top 3.

[Powdork]

This chart [webmasterworld.com] helps to give an idea of who powers who. Looks like its ready for some tweaking. For a more international look this international se relationship chart [webmasterworld.com] is excellent. Don't know if its been updated in the last year though.

[Namaste]

Google's marketshare is irrelevant.

70% - 90% of taffic to all webmasters here is from Google & family.

What is the definition of marketshare? Does it mean no. of people using Google; or does it mean the no. of times you press enter next to the searchbox? Some might say it's the no. people...that is not correct...it may be that many people use other search engines, but they are not "mature" searchers...they just happen to search once in a while. Anyone who is using search as a "lifestyle" product today is using Google.

[rfgdxm1]

>70% - 90% of taffic to all webmasters here is from Google & family.

Read the post by aleksl. This is not true.

[Arnett]

70% - 90% of taffic to all webmasters here is from Google & family.

I have good rankings with Google,AlltheWeb and AltaVista. I have 3 domains. It's generally a foot race 40%-35% either way between Altavista or Google with the remaining traffic coming from other search engines. I haven't done a check to see which of the other search engines are powered by Google.

[Namaste]

Alkesi's may be a case of better SEO on the local SEs...Google is powering the results not only in many important online languages, but also that of major portals around the world.

There has been several threads on this topic in the past and webmasters (globally) have indicated that google forms over 2/3 of traffic.

[aleksl]

"There ave been numerous discussions at xyz.com, and people indicated that the Earth is flat" :)

How is that qualifies for the scientific research? So there's no somewhat scientific studies done by a well-known independent agency?...

Of course it was. Here's results by Nielsen NetRaitings
[searchenginewatch.com...]

Audience reach, January 2003:
Google - 29.5%
Yahoo - 28.9%
MSN - 27.6%
AOL - 18.4%
Ask Jeeves - 9.9%
Overture - 4.8%
InfoSpace - 4.5%
Netscape - 4.4%
AltaVista - 4%
etc.

Total Search Hours (in Millions), January 2003
Google - 18.7
AOL - 15.5
Yahoo - 7.1
MSN - 5.4
Ask Jeeves - 2.3
InfoSpace - 1.1
etc.

Now you can figure out who supplies results to whom, and make assumptions on GG marketshare

A

[rfgdxm1]

And if I am reading the right aleksl, those are US specific figures. If so, they may not be very representative globally.

[heini]

Aleks, Nielsen Netratings are not to be taken seriously, as to the real traffic powered by search engines.
Nielsen "measures" reach, not searches performed.
That's two totally different things.

Their research is not based on any real measurements. They don't compute data from servers, sites or whatever.

What they do is they ask a handful of people.

And then those figures go into countless mainstream media publications.

>foot race 40%-35% either way between Altavista or Google
What country are you targeting?

[twilight47]

All politics are local and so are SERPS. I couldn't care less what any global or national SE stats. It's what bring traffic to each person's site. We get 90% of our traffic from Google and Goolge based results.
It's obviously better to generate more traffic from heavily used SE's, but you have to take what you can get.

[Arnett]

foot race 40%-35% either way between Altavista or Google

What country are you targeting?

I don't target countries. I try to target languages (English,Spanish,German,French & Chinese).

[Namaste]

Like I said earlier: Google Family=Google+Yahoo+AOL+Netscape. Neilsen says 80%...we on webmasterworld say the same thing...so neilsen is right for once ;)

[guoqi]

>>>What do the people in China use to search?
>>>I'm told that the most popular Chinese search engines are sohu.com and 163.com.

Arnett,
It is not really right to say that the most popular Chinese search engines are sohu.com and 163.com. sohu.com and 163.com are two very popular sites in China, however, their search results are powered by BAIDU.com. They combined the result from Baidu.com with their own commercial results.

So,you can said the biggest search engine in China is www.baidu.com, Google is the follow up. huicong.com may have some market share on news search.

Help this helps. I am a Chinese living in Holland.

[aleksl]

>Nielsen "measures" reach, not searches performed. That's two totally different things.

And you may be right. My point was that they actually MEASURED what 60,000 people did, and recorded it. That is a much better gauge then "a consensus of some anonymous people on site xyz.com, although they claim to be the experts in the field". Of course I do not intend to offend anyone here, it's just there's a difference between an obviously bold statement and a scientific research, and at least Nielsen may somewhat qualify as the latter.

I wish there WAS a better measurment tool. And since non of the non-Google SEs blow their marketing horn about them "having X% of all searches", it is fairly safe to assume that their market share is insignificant.

My 5 cents.