Google owns the search market, but for other content types the number two search engine company has first place in those categories.
After Hitwise’s Bill Tancer reported on the minimal usage of Google’s domains beyond the main search page, he received a number of requests to look at the top three Internet players to see how they measure up in various categories.
Using the numbers from the week ended May 13th, Google owns the search market with a 47.4 percent share. Yahoo and MSN trail at 16 and 11.5 percent, respectively. Collectively the three represent 7.3 percent of all Internet visits for that week.
In email, news, and finance, the market shares are not even close. Yahoo Mail picked up 42.4 percent of email visits, while MSN Hotmail drew 22.9 percent. Gmail’s 2.54 percent was good enough for fourth place behind MySpace Mail’s 19.5 percent.
Hitwise includes weather sites in its news category, but Yahoo News proved more popular than the Weather Channel, MSNBC, and CNN for the week with a 6.3 percent share. Google News at 1.9 percent came in fifth.
Since the common wisdom holds that people have been finding news online in greater numbers, it looks like no one news site serves as a dominant holder of market share. Even Fox News, which has been beating its cable competitors in the ratings, doesn’t make the top five in news site share for the period.
The ultra-competitive finance market has been made so due to the lucrative advertisers and rich Internet users it can attract. It’s the market where Yahoo really stands out, at 34.9 percent of visits during the week. MSN Money Central rates a respectable second place with 13.4 percent.
Google’s beta launch of Google Finance has yet to find its audience. A mark of 0.29 percent puts it in 40th place in market share.
None of the three top the Travel – Maps category. Long-time leader Mapquest, owned by AOL, has 56.3 percent of the market. Yahoo fares well by showing up in second place at 20.5 percent, followed by Google Maps at 7.5 percent.
Maybe Yahoo really is the most impressive player on the Internet. But as long as Google keeps raking in the billions with search advertising, Yahoo will continue to suffer from the stock market’s impression that it could be doing much better.
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David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
