At this point you start to wonder why bother: Google reins supreme in the realm of search, Yahoo doesn’t, neither does Microsoft, and everybody else might as well hang it up.
MGoogle Grows, Others Slow
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You want to talk about digital divides…Google’s share of searches is more than the other nine top search engines combined – probably farther down the list than that but Nielsen//NetRatings didn’t report beyond the top ten.
There were 3.7 billion searches conducted at Google in the month of April 2007, giving the juggernaut 55.2% share in the US search market overall (unless you add AOL’s share, since Google runs that too, which gives them an additional 5.4%).
That’s a 42% gain over this last year. Though Yahoo grew also by just over 28%, Google’s nearest threat still attracted less than half of the number of searches Google had. At a respectable 1.49 billion searches, Yahoo holds steady at almost 22%.
MSN/Windows Live? Well, “live” is the technical term for one still breathing at a sustainable clip. Microsoft’s running just 9% of the search market with 612 million (yes, yawn, just with an ‘m’) searches, a year-over-year growth of 7.4%.
Ask.com, coming in at around 3.5 percentage points below AOL, lost market share, slipping by 2.3% year-over-year, capturing just 1.8% of the search market. Maybe their aggressive (and silly) multi-media “The Algorithm” campaign can help them change that (but I’ll believe it when I see it).
As for the rest, they’re not really worth mentioning with one percent or less of the search market, but we will list them in the credits anyway: MyWeb, Comcast, EarthLink, Dogpile, and MyWay.
(MyWay posts an impressive 81% drop in year-over-year growth.)
If there’s any leveling this playing field, it’s going to involve a Microsoft and Yahoo merger – which still gives them just 31% of the market. That’s a respectable chunk, but still far behind the Google monster.
