March Market Share: Two-Thirds of the US Online Population Is Using Google
Written by Jeremy Crane (contact - e-mail) -- April 18th, 2007 |
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After last month’s market share release Danny Sullivan was kind enough to reach out to us and asked us a few questions about our search numbers. As a result we did some digging into the numbers and have improved our market share assessments. Anyone out there who’s been watching search for a few years is likely familiar with “The Google Dance.” Well no worries, we don’t plan to make our readers keep dancing. We just want to make sure you have the most accurate figures. Now on to the numbers.
Google just keeps going and going … almost puts the Energizer Bunny to shame. Google market share gained another 2ppts in March. So here’s a question. If Google gains one more point in market share, will we lose our veto power? That’s right, for all intents and purposes two-thirds of the 6.4 billion web search queries in the US pass through the Google servers.
On other fronts it was another tough month for web search market just about everywhere other than Google. Ask saw a lift in overall queries but that was partially offset by a 1% increase in overall queries across all engines.
It looks like we may have been a little overzealous last month regarding MSN/Live’s search market share gains. After strong gains in February, Live search dipped slightly again in March. My original supposition was that the gains were perhaps driven by the consumer launch of Vista. If that was the case I wouldn’t expect it to taper off after only one month … perhaps but not likely. So if that wasn’t it then what drove the unexpected sharp gains? We’d love to hear any of your thoughts on the matter.
* Search market share includes web search only and is calculated based on unique queries within each session during the given month.
Did you like that post? You'll love these.
- November 2007 Search Market Share: The Market, Google, and Yahoo! All Break Search Records?
- February Search Market Share: Live Search is on the move
- March Search Market Share: March Madness in the Search World
- April Search Market Share: Yahoo! Gains, Outpaces Google
- May Search Market Share: Nothing But Google
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April 19th, 2007 at 9:24 pm
Have used your graphs here.
http://startupmeme.com/2007/04/19/googles-honeymoon-season-continues/
Keep up the good work and do keep posting more of these goodies on a timely basis.
April 22nd, 2007 at 9:44 pm
You’re not really measuring “search market share” by addressing number of queries performed. You’re measurin “query share”, but that doesn’t tell us anything the size of each search engine’s audience, the quality of the user experience, or why people search so much on Google and less on other search engines.
A better metric would look at more than just which search engine serves the most queries. Many queries running on Google are automated anyway. Do you filter those out?