Yahoo managed to please its CEO while holding serve in comScore’s search engine rankings for February 2006, but Microsoft, Ask, and Time Warner/AOL gave up some ground. Among brands people sought through search in 2006, MySpace topped a Hitwise list of searched brand terms
Reuters cited Yahoo CEO Terry Semel, who told an AdAge conference his company’s first quarter earnings would show “some very exciting numbers.” This will be due to Yahoo’s February 5th formal launch of its new search advertising platform, Panama.
Google clocked in at 48.1 percent of the US search market by comScore’s reckoning for February. That represented a gain of 0.6 percent from January.
While Yahoo managed to cling to the same 28.1 percent it held in the previous month, the next three search engines handed searchers to Google. The rich did get richer, while Microsoft dropped 0.1 percent to 10.5, Ask slid 0.2 to 5.0, and Time Warner sites stepped back 0.1 to 4.9.
When people search for brand names in 2006, Yahoo rated highly in a Hitwise analysis. They found MySpace was the most searched brand name based on the search activity of some 10 million Internet users in the US.
Following MySpace were eBay and Yahoo in second and third; MapQuest and Craigslist rounded out the top five. “Search term data is a great way to measure brand equity, brand association with product, and unaided brand recall as it reflects what consumers are truly interested in,” said Tessa Court, chief marketing officer for Hitwise.
Wal-Mart, Google, Target, Match.com, and Bank of America finished out the top ten brands in the Hitwise review.
