Marketing research firm Hitwise just released numbers for July discussing search engine rankings. The information from a press release on Tekrati says Google is still the top dog for search, more than double the number of searches of their closest competitor, Yahoo.
The report said that Google has 59.2% versus Yahoo’s 28.8% and MSN’s measly 5.5% of the market. The top 3 accounted for 93.5% of the total search market. One comment Hitwise made discussed Google’s lack of a portal to drive traffic, saying 73% of Yahoo’s traffic comes directly its main portal sites of Yahoo.com and My.Yahoo.Com and MSN received 61% of its traffic from its portal sites: WWW.MSN.Com, My.MSN.com and dellnet.msn.com.
“Google continues to demonstrate the value of effective Internet search on its own, irrespective of any connection to a general Internet portal,” said Bill Tancer, General Manager, Worldwide Research, Hitwise in the release. “Clearly the next big challenge for Google will be the arrival of Microsoft’s new operating system, “Vista,” which is said to have far tighter search integration.”
They also said that while Google sets high above the others in general search, Yahoo does better in the local search market, one of the fastest growing niches of search going right now. Hitwise said Yahoo Local received 4.4 times the visitors that Google Local did although Google’s percentage of visits grew by 61% versus Yahoo’s 14%.
A category Yahoo appears relatively weak in is the mapping category. Local users like good maps and Google’s got a stronger map offering, climbing to third in Hitwise’s Travel – Maps category. Google’s map advancements may give them an edge in the map race.
The only criticism some may have is Google as a non-portal site. Considering Google News, while being a great site, essentially serves as a portal for news but it’s still a portal and for that matter, the personalized Google site is a portal as well. You pick and choose your content and there sits Google search atop the page.
John Stith is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
