U.S. Search Share: Google Shows Growth of 44.9 Percent

[engine]

Google Inc.'s online search engine maintained the largest share of the U.S. Internet search market in May, according to a report released Wednesday by Nielsen/NetRatings.

Google was at 56.3% market share with 4.03billion searches.
Yahoo Inc. 21.5% share with 1.54billion searches.
Microsoft's MSN/ Windows Live was 8.4% share with 605.4 million searches.
AOL Search share 5.3%, 381million searches.
Ask.com Search share 2.0%, at 142million searches.

[nielsen-netratings.com...]

[ddogg]

Yahoo! took years to finally release Panama, and guess what, it's a joke compared to AdWords. Same with MSN adCenter, though adCenter's problems are more to due with low volume.

Like I said before, I believe Terry Semel killed Yahoo!. In the time he was in charge, Yahoo didn't change their PPC platform for what, 4+ years? That's CRAZY. And they never focused on search, it was always 'brand advertiser' this, 'brand advertising' that. Old media thinking.

The problem is Google is only widening the gap, it isn't shrinking. And I don't just mean in search marketshare. It's the brainpower that is growing at Google while shrinking everywhere else. How many Phd's do they have now?

I don't want to see one company owning search, that would be bad for business. MS might catch up, but Yahoo! won't. They're done. MS should buy them already.

[centime]

I dunno if this is relevant to anyone, but as my google traffic has grown, so has my yahoo traffic an the ratio is usually like

9:5 Google:yahoo

Then again, my traffic is probably minuscle compared to many folk here,

So, to me, the market research is actually spot on

[callivert]

It's easy for a company worth billions of dollars to influence the statistics.

Yes, and the data from pretty much every webmaster on this forum is that Google referrals are higher than the official numbers. For many, they seem to send 90+% of search traffic.
Make of that what you will.

(I'm not trying to start a new straw poll on "how much traffic do you get from Google?" I'm just summarizing the general outcome of most threads on the topic.)

[bw3ttt]

Let's not forget that most of us spend our time optimizing for Google SERPs and Adwords and spend much less time optimizing for MS and Y!

It would be odd for the other guys to send more traffic than Goo unless you spent lots of time optimizing for them.

[moTi]

numbers from germany:

google search market share: >90%
yahoo: 3%

yahoo is practically non-existent as a search tool (just as the other players). plus, since years they still haven't managed to enter the advertising market with their ppc engine.
and with the latest outrage because of their flickr-censorship for german audience (users are blocked from seeing images that are not flagged as "safe") they do them no favor concerning reputation.

yahoo repeatedly proves that they have no clue of markets outside the us.

[mfishy]

Yes, and the data from pretty much every webmaster on this forum is that Google referrals are higher than the official numbers. For many, they seem to send 90+% of search traffic.

Bad Seo?

[jeffgroovy]

bad seo?

I've never optimized for one search engine or another, I just did what I thought was generally a good idea, and as it turns out Google showed more love then the Yahoo or MSN.

[europeforvisitors]

I've never optimized for one search engine or another, I just did what I thought was generally a good idea, and as it turns out Google showed more love then the Yahoo or MSN.

Ditto here, but even for terms where I rank as high in Yahoo or MSN as I do in Google, I get far less traffic from those search engines than I should according to the market-share figures.

[richardb]

Guys your stats amaze me

1. Google
2. Live
3. Yahoo

and has been consistantly for 12 months + Live is at least 1%+ ahead of Yahoo.

[centime]

you don't give percentages richardb, it would be useful

mine

google 55%
Yahoo 28%
Msn 12%
others 5%

[richardb]

MSN loves blogs and small posts climing from 6.02% over the last 12 months to at the decline of Yahoo G has stayed the same.

Msn 8.93%
yahoo 5.23%

[jeffgroovy]

Ditto here, but even for terms where I rank as high in Yahoo or MSN as I do in Google, I get far less traffic from those search engines than I should according to the market-share figures.

Exactly! One explain I have is that maybe there are niches that get much higher search volume on yahoo and msn then any of the niches I happen to be in, thereby offsetting the low stats I appear to see.

Or maybe msn and yahoo have a disproportionately larger non-English speaking market that searches using non-English terms and therefore find non-English websites and that offsets their ridiculously low English speaking market share.

Or here's a conspiracy theory for ya: Google is somehow involved in suppressing their huge search market share to avoid intervention from governments that would otherwise shun them for monopoly avoidance purposes.(Just another factless speculative idea for conversation sake)

In all reality unless we actually have a large pool of webmasters (including non English webmasters) contributing their stats we can't say the report is either right or wrong with any real certainty. For the record my stats have consistently showed google market share over the course of years is much larger then any of the reports I've seen.

[bregan]

yahoo repeatedly proves that they have no clue of markets outside the us.

It's my understanding that Yahoo owns search in Japan and Hong Kong, so it would seem that it is the US market it has no clue about.

[engine]

According to Comscore, for May:

Research firm comScore recorded 7.6 billion search queries in May, 3.9 billion of which were made from Google, giving the search engine a 50.7 per cent market share.

The figure is a one per cent increase from April, when Google claimed a 49.7 market share, and an increase of more than three per cent since the start of 2007.

Yahoo saw its market share drop from 26.8 to 26.4 per cent. The firm has seen its share of the search market fall by more than two per cent since the beginning of the year.

Time Warner's search services, which include former net giant AOL, dropped from five per cent to 4.6 per cent in May. All other search engines combined accounted for three per cent of all queries.

Of the top five search engines only Microsoft's saw its share of the market remain constant, logging 782 million queries last month and giving the company 10.3 per cent of the US market.

Comscore figures [vnunet.com]

[centime]

interesting how close that is to my figures,

[jeffgroovy]

Centime, are your sites rankings pretty well rounded in terms of fairly even ranking across yahoo, msn, and google? admittedly for the most part I don't have very good rankings in Yahoo, most of my rankings are far better at google, so it's easy to see why my numbers are extremely heavy towards google, but like EFV said even on the terms that are ranked fairly evenly across all three I'm still heavy on Google traffic. Maybe you have a big enough empire across enough subjects to get stats that more closely represent that report?