New statistics from Nielsen Online point out that Google’s dominance of the search market is not going away anytime soon, as Google Search Engine usages has grown substantially over the past year by 16.7%. Google now holds an estimated 64.2% of the “search share market.”
Keep in mind, a lot of search users use multiple search engines, so this does NOT mean that 64.2% of users ONLY search Google. According to Nielsen, Google’s share represents 6.1 billion searches, which is roughly four times greater, or 400% more, than Yahoo Search, which has a 15.8% share of the search market with an estimated 1.5 billion searches, an estimated growth of 1.7% over the past year.
Yahoo’s possible future parent company Microsoft however has barely seen any growth in search share over the past year, with only a 0.3% growth over the past year and a 10.3% hold of the search market.
Of course if Yahoo AND Microsoft Search do merge under an almost inescapable acquisition of Yahoo by Redmond, that combined share would be roughly 26% of the search market, and growth would be expected as a Google alternative with inherent browser and communications integration (Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, IE, Yahoo Messenger …etc.) would gather interest and enhanced circulation of search on the desktop and beyond.
One interesting stat is that AOL Search has shown more growth than Microsoft or Yahoo, with a 6.6% growth after last year. AOL has been quite aggressive in the establishment of their content network and bringing together all of the search and advertising acquisitions it has made over the past couple of years.
AOL has made moves which show that the company is getting very serious about search, and may one day step out of the shadow it has cast upon itself as being a “Google regurgitator.”
AOL recruited Google Senior VP of Advertising Tim Armstrong away from Google to become their new CEO. Furthermore, AOL controls some rather interesting search technology, ranging from semantic search to multimedia search, including :
- the social video network Truveo
- Relegence
- Yedda Semantic Search
- & Quigo all being part of AOL.
AOL is not to be overlooked.
With Yahoo and other search earnings reports coming out this week, and the possible advertising partnership of Microsoft and Yahoo being at the top of the weekend rumor mill, this is proving to be an exciting time for search. We’re seeing companies which have been loading up their arsenals, and cutting back on wasteful spending, begin to forge partnerships and ventures which may one day position them to go head to head against Google.
Of course, Google is much more than search now, with the company going on strong in the utility and fuel industries, Google becoming the poster boy for cloud computing, the Google Chrome browser, partnerships with NASA, Google Apps still trying to take on Microsoft Office, Google Earth being the defacto mapping tool of the world, and the emergence of Google Voice; but search is the common bond which holds all of these offering together.
