At this point you start to wonder why bother: Google reins supreme in the realm of search, Yahoo doesn’t, neither does Microsoft, and everybody else might as well hang it up.
MGoogle Grows, Others Slow
You want to talk about digital divides…Google’s share of searches is more than the other nine top search engines combined – probably farther down the list than that but Nielsen//NetRatings didn’t report beyond the top ten.
There were 3.7 billion searches conducted at Google in the month of April 2007, giving the juggernaut 55.2% share in the US search market overall (unless you add AOL’s share, since Google runs that too, which gives them an additional 5.4%).
That’s a 42% gain over this last year. Though Yahoo grew also by just over 28%, Google’s nearest threat still attracted less than half of the number of searches Google had. At a respectable 1.49 billion searches, Yahoo holds steady at almost 22%.
MSN/Windows Live? Well, “live” is the technical term for one still breathing at a sustainable clip. Microsoft’s running just 9% of the search market with 612 million (yes, yawn, just with an ‘m’) searches, a year-over-year growth of 7.4%.
Ask.com, coming in at around 3.5 percentage points below AOL, lost market share, slipping by 2.3% year-over-year, capturing just 1.8% of the search market. Maybe their aggressive (and silly) multi-media “The Algorithm” campaign can help them change that (but I’ll believe it when I see it).
As for the rest, they’re not really worth mentioning with one percent or less of the search market, but we will list them in the credits anyway: MyWeb, Comcast, EarthLink, Dogpile, and MyWay.
(MyWay posts an impressive 81% drop in year-over-year growth.)
If there’s any leveling this playing field, it’s going to involve a Microsoft and Yahoo merger – which still gives them just 31% of the market. That’s a respectable chunk, but still far behind the Google monster.
