“Good game, good game.” That’s what we used to say to each other after sporting events, even if one side had walloped the other by an almost unimaginable amount. And that’s what somebody might say to the Yahoo search team in Britain – it isn’t winning, but it sure is trying hard.
A report from Hitwise UK’s Heather Hopkins puts Yahoo’s share of the market at exactly 8.6 percent. Its main competitor, Google, is used for 78 percent of searches in Britain. That’s more than nine times as much, and though this has long been the case, it has to be frustrating for the Sunnyvale-based company.
But the Yahoo team is putting forth an effort – give ‘em credit for making a 13 percent year-on-year increase in terms of share. Google, on the other hand, increased its share by just three percent in the same period.
Still, they both went up, and this might lead one to wonder at whose expense this growth occurred. Hopkins’s numbers point directly at MSN Search, which suffered a 25 percent year-on-year loss. Ask.com’s numbers dropped by just two percent (not that any drop is a good thing).
And there you have it. As E-consultancy’s Robert Andrews points out, “The figures show that Yahoo is successfully making in-roads into Google’s dominance at the expense of lesser rivals. If it can continue to do that, even without making direct dents in Google’s share, it will happily grow its user base.”
