Due to the recession, the idea of a 0.3 percent drop sounds like nothing at all; plunges of 5, 10, and 20 percent are the norm now. Still, Compete has released its description of the search market in January, and the report’s sure to turn a few heads with that exact figure.
According to Compete, Google’s share of the market went from 70.5 percent in December to 70.2 percent in January. This implies a break in the search giant’s usual onward-and-upward movement, which is noteworthy enough even if Compete isn’t your favorite statistics provider.
What makes the 0.3 percent slip even more interesting is that comScore reported a similar 0.5 percent decrease in Google’s market share during the same time period. So we appear to be looking at more than one company’s blip.
The search giant isn’t about to be toppled, though. To round up Compete’s coverage of the search industry in January, Yahoo’s share increased by 0.3 percent (to 19.3 percent), MSN/Live’s share moved downward by 0.2 percent (to 19.7 percent), and Ask managed the tiniest gain of 0.1 percent (reaching a market share of 2.5 percent).
Assuming Google and Yahoo continued to lose and gain 0.3 percent of market share every month, respectively, it’d be about seven years before they met in the middle.
