Search Engine Market Shares

Here’s an interesting Press Release from comScore this month. It’s just about search and not about the overall popularity of a web property. For instance, I am told that Yahoo! gets 2.5 times the traffic of Google overall, for instance. It does show the power of brand to drive traffic. Is the library brand strong enough and in the right head space? The OCLC Perceptions report would seem to say no. I also wonder whether libraries should be building toolbar searches for our sites. They are an important battleground for searching market share. The emergence of MySpace as a search portal is interesting too.
As with most poll/survey results you end up with more questions. I also have questions about mobile search (eg. GOOGL on your cel), Amazon A9 as a search portal, and how many people use multiple search engines for the same query. Now if Google bought Facebook, if eBay’s partnership with Yahoo! grows well, and Amazon replacing Google with MSN Search changes things, what’s next, hmmmmmm?
All I can say is that I don’t believe the search landscape is stable or static for the next 5 years. This is an opportunity for libraries to shine.
Either way, resisance is not futile. We need to capture the important searches.
Google Gains U.S. Search Market Share For Ninth Consecutive Month
comScore Releases April Search Engine Rankings
RESTON, Va., May 22, 2006 – comScore Networks today released its monthly qSearch analysis of activity across competitive search engines. In April 2006, Google gained in search market share for the ninth consecutive month and maintained its status as market leader with 43.1 percent of all U.S. searches conducted on its sites. Yahoo! remained in second place with 28.0 percent, while MSN ranked third with 12.9 percent.
Detailed chart here. Share of Online Searches by Enginechanges
April 2006 vs. April 2005
• Americans conducted 6.6 billion searches online in April 2006, up 4 percent from last month.
• Google Sites led the pack with 2.9 billion search queries performed, followed by Yahoo Sites (1.9 billion), MSN-Microsoft (858 million), Time-Warner Network (457 million), and Ask Jeeves/Ask Network (384 million).
• MySpace.com has been added to the search engine rankings for April 2006, coming in at 6th place with 43 million search queries performed (0.6 percent share of the U.S. search market). Will this smaller player eventually be able to grab a substantial share of the search market due to the site’s remarkable popularity?
• Google and Yahoo! continued their dominance among toolbar searches, combining for more than 95 percent of the market share in April. Google grabbed 48.0 percent of toolbar searches, while Yahoo! captured 47.6 percent.
qSearch includes Web searches originating from the search engines reported, other Web-based searches such as News and Image searches and channel searches conducted on portal sites (e.g., Finance and Movies). qSearch does not include Yellow Pages or Maps searches.
For more information on comScore qSearch, please email [email protected] or call (650) 244-5412.
About comScore Networks
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