Online Marketing Blog’s coverage from day one of Search Engine Strategies San Jose 2007
Who is the biggest engine? Who’s growing? What verticals are better than others and what does this all mean? Those were a few of the questions talked about in the the Search Landscape session.
It should come as no surprise that Google continues to dominate the market share. Actually Bill Tancer at Hitwise said that that bit of news has been in his last 10 presentations on the search landscape dating back to 2004. Google’s been growing and continues to do so. Within Google, web search is the most visited with 70.28%, YouTube at 10.61%, Google Image 6.5%, Gmail 6.16%, Maps 1.65%, Video 1.14% of traffic according to Bill. He also felt that Yahoo and Ask were up while MSN decreased.
Jon Stewart at at Nielsen contradicted that a bit and felt that MSN actually rose a bit and Jeremy Crane at Compete also felt that MSN increased and they show that Yahoo is on the decline in amount of market share. With many different companies collecting the same sort of data, it’s important to know that they are all looking at the numbers differently and taking different factors into account. The only item they really agree on is the fact that Google in increasing and that no other engine is keeping up.
Bill also shared that in all the 1678 engines that they track, human powered search engines such as Mahalo don’t appear in the top 100. Actually, they appear closer to the 400 mark. It could be due to fact that it’s a newer engine, or it could be an indication that users aren’t interested with human powered search. However, sites like Facebook will become the new start page on many browsers and search engines need to get into these social networking sites to help get the users.
When looking at query data, James Lamberti from comScore showed MySpace and eBay having more queries than Ask or AOL. He even asked “Could MySpace be the #4 search engine?” He also pointed out that Yahoo and Google have seen an increase in the amount of paid ad coverage for web search while others decline over the past year. He stated that Yahoos Panama was the major factor in Yahoo increasing in this space.
Jeremy Crane from Compete said that Google has the most loyal customers with 92% of users, doing an airline related search in July, did not go anywhere else to get different results. Yahoo’s loyalty score was 75% where as MSN’s was 66%. He went on to say though that you have to ensure your site is everywhere and just focusing on Google unless you are willing to walk away from possible customers in other area.
Jeremy also stated that Compete will be launching a new web analytics tool on September 12th. It’s currently in private beta but look for it soon. James Lamberti also had a bit of news as qSearch 2.0 is launching this morning.
Other coverage of this session:
Search Engine Roundtable – Tamar Weinberg
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