Searchers in the US made Google their choice in March 2007, as Hitwise reported a 64 percent market share for the search engine.
Last March, Hitwise pegged Google’s share of the US search market at 58 percent. Those were the days when competitors at Yahoo and Microsoft had some hopes of making inroads against Google.
Flash forward a year later. Google extends its lead at the expense of the competition, particularly Microsoft, which saw its share drop out of double digits and hover under ten percent. If Yahoo is happy with being in second place, well, they’ve got what they wished for with about 22 percent of March 2007 market share.
Microsoft’s percentages, combining search at MSN and Windows Live, ticks a tiny bit above nine percent. Fourth place engine Ask took about three and a half percent, virtually the same as February 2007 for them.
The strategies for search for Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask, seem to be more about the traffic they have than the traffic they don’t get. Yahoo updated its search advertising system to work more like Google’s; it doesn’t have to outperform Google, it just has to perform better than what came before it.
Microsoft has experienced executive upheaval in the places where it expected to compete more directly with Google. People have departed Redmond at the points of contact that would rub up against Google the most. It’s anyone’s guess as to how effectively they can use their tech market leverage to gain more search market share.
Ask has been hammering at building a model of efficiency when it comes to creating an information at one’s fingertips architecture. When they can deliver the best answer for a searcher at the top of the page, they do it, period, sponsored link spots be damned.
And Google keeps churning along, a steamship of wealth traversing the broad oceans of data on the Internet. Alex Iskold at Read/WriteWeb called Google “the ultimate money making machine,” citing nigh-unlimited supply and demand for its services.
Iskold wondered what can possibly beat Google:
We are not talking about a better search engine; we are looking instead for a better, less costly and more efficient business model. At the moment, it is difficult to imagine what could possibly beat billions of links meeting millions of eyeballs daily.
64 percent market share in search for March 2007? We might be calling that a low point for Google in 12 months.
