Search engines led by Google and Yahoo processed nearly 5.1 billion queries from users in December 2005, a huge jump from the 3.2 billion they delivered in December 2004.
Good news for Google from Nielsen//NetRatings – their share of the search market grew to 48.8 percent in December 2005 from 43.1 percent in December 2004.
Bad news for Microsoft – that gain looks like it came from their piece of the market, as their share for December ’05 was 10.9 percent, while the figure was 14 percent in December ’04.
In between the two competitors, Yahoo held serve with 21.7 percent for December 2005 versus 21.4 percent in December 2004. Although Yahoo CFO Susan Decker may be happy with one out of every five searches conducted, the Yahoo Search team probably is not.
Out of those five-plus billion queries in December 2005, Google handled over 2.4 billion. Yahoo saw over a billion stream through its servers, while MSN Search parsed 553 million.
For Microsoft to erode Google’s dominance of the search space, MSN Search has to pull a billion queries away from their Mountain View competition. If Yahoo really is conceding the market to Google, they are saying they can’t draw 700 million queries away from them. Bill Gates’ road ahead looks really bumpy in search.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
