US market share of search queries rose again at Google, while that of its next three competitors dropped.
The zero sum game of search market share continues to add up to gains for Google.
Metrics firm Hitwise pegged Google’s June 2008 share at 69.17 percent of US queries made. In May, the percentage stood at 68.29 percent.
Yahoo, MSN Search, and Ask.com all saw month over month declines. Yahoo dropped to 19.62 percent, followed by MSN Search at 5.46 percent. Ask.com ticked 4.17 percent in June.
Hitwise said 42 other search engines combined to account for 1.7 percent of queries made in the US.
As a traffic driver, Google and other search engines serve as the conduit through which traffic flows to key industries in the US. Health and Medical sites topped the list of industries benefiting from the largess of search.
45.52 percent of Health and Medical traffic arrived downstream from search. Among those health-related sites in that category, 31.08 percent of traffic came from Google, which has designs on getting more involved with managing healthcare information online.
Lucrative advertising and heavy interest in medical topics by searchers makes healthcare a consideration both by the search engines (Microsoft having already launched its HealthVault service) and a host of startup companies.
Google’s control of so much traffic being driven to medical sites makes it an important venue for medical advertising. Whether or not Google ever builds real scale and finds a substantial audience for its health project, the company should profit handsomely from the continued placement of medical ads.
