Nielsen NetRatings put out their new numbers for July. Things didn’t shift much but there were a couple of surprises. The biggest was Ask Jeeves dropping down to 6th in the search engine rankings.
No big surprise that Google remains solidly in first place all their overall percentage dropped slightly from 47% to 46.2% Yahoo came in a distant second although closing the gap slightly up from 22.3% to 22.5%. MSN came in at third, improving a tenth of a point to 12.6%. AOL came in at 4th with 5% and My Way was 5th moving up to nearly half a point to 2.2.
Ask Jeeves moved down to 1.6 from it’s previous tie with My Way and now is tied with Netscape for search. It’s quite possible they could drop further. Rounding out the list was Dogpile, a meta search engine, in 8th and tied with them is iWon both at 1% and then finally is Earthlink in the 10th slot.
In a second list, they ranked search engines by an average number of searches per search with the average search conducting nearly 38 searches a month. Google once again topped the list with 27.4 followed by Yahoo with 20.1. Netscape was 3rd with 19.7, Dogpile was 4th with 15 and MSN came in at 5th with 14.
Earthlink was 6th followed closely by Earthlink, My Search, iWon, Webcrawler.com and My Way ending the list with 11.8 searches. Ask Jeeves didn’t even make this list. Which ought to say something.
Ask Jeeves seems to be the rule loser in this study. They aren’t getting many searches and there overall ranking dropped. In their defense, there were recently picked up by IAC and at the recent SES: San Jose conference, they stated they will be investing in the brand. After this dismal month, they need to start pouring on the steam though because they are falling in the rankings.
One to keep an eye on might be Webcrawler.com. They nearly doubled the number of searches per month. Dogpile also looks to be doing pretty well.
This all comes as Google launched their new IM and VoIP service today. This also shows that to really bring in the revenues, search engines may need to look at a more portalized approach to things. As Yahoo, AOL and MSN make significant portions of their revenue from other things. Even though Google dominates search, people spend more time on the portals, looking at email, chatting etc. Jeeves and others will need to find a way to differentiate themselves but soar at it as well.
John Stith is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
