May Search Market Share: Google, Live, and Ask all up
Written by Jeremy Crane (contact - e-mail) -- June 13th, 2007 | Recommend ThisMay brought more of the same for Google. With monthly search volumes among US consumers up 2.6% on Google, the search giant gained another point in market share. Interestingly enough however, most of these gains appear to have come from the smaller “tier two engines.” Among the other top-4 players only Yahoo! saw a monthly decline in search volume and that was relatively minor. Yahoo! market share dipped slightly to just below 20% in May.
Outside of Google, the other big players seem to be on a bit of a roller coaster these days; up one month and down the next. In May, MSN/Live turned the corner a bit and posted the first month-over-month gains since February. Ask was the big winner in terms of monthly volume growth, up over 9% from April to May. Still Google remained the only engine with any year-over-year gains.
A few very interesting things hit the search engine market in June that should make for lots of discussion next month. On June 4th, Ask 3D launched, presenting Ask users with a new “morphing” search results page. Then on June 9th Privacy International released a report that severely criticized Google’s privacy practices. Matt Cutts of Google posted a rebuttal to the report here. Then Donna Bogatin of ZDNet post a rebuttal to the rebuttal here … and on and on and on, the debate continues across the blogosphere. The real question that remains is how this will play with the overall consumer population. We shall see, we shall see …
*Search market share includes web search only and is calculated based on unique queries within each session during the given month.
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June 13th, 2007 at 3:15 pm
Not too surprising really.
I do have to give Live some props though. I’ve actually been using it a little bit of late and have been pleasantly surprised. The relevancy isn’t quite up to snuff with Google or Yahoo yet, but it’s not too far off either and usually gives you want you need within the first few results. And aesthetically, I find their results page more visually pleasing than the results page on Google.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens as more people gradually migrate over to Vista (which has great built-in desktop search with the default option of getting Live web results too.) I’m sure Google will continue to dominate, but it might open people’s eyes to other options too (which is no doubt why Google is currently complaining about getting their desktop search product into Vista.)
June 13th, 2007 at 3:24 pm
The new Ask is slick. I’m thoroughly impressed with how they have grown and improved the service.
I question the “the algorithm” branding. I’m sure it was inspired by Verizon’s success with “It’s the Network”, but just seems like a hollow claim when Google is still considered the most technically competant (ironically, I think i spelled that wrong).
My advice that Ask follows Nike’s decade old lead… Find a few technical influencers and have them endorese your brand… Steve Jobs? Reilley? Some NASA guy? Professor from Cal Tech? The Dali Lama?
See where I’m going with this? People follow others… just show some big timers claiming “they are off Google and on to Ask”.
June 14th, 2007 at 10:08 pm
I’ve been using Live Search lately, and I agree with RustyS, Live Search is good in many ways. I love Instant Answers. Answers to ‘TWX stock’ brings you a little datatable of how Time Warner stock is doing. ‘Houston traffic’ bring up a useable Virtual Earth map, right on the search page. ‘Russia’ brings top news articles. ‘weather’ brings actual weather forecasts. That’s the kind of stuff I like! :)
While the search isn’t completely there sometimes, it’s getting there. I think Live Search just needs more users to sort out the algorithim better. Google’s probaly only winning because it still has 1/2 the world’s users. More people = more relevant. Though seeing a video of Google’s Master Plan, and hearing them make stupid complaints against Vista search, and tons of other bad stuff, has made me lost a bit of love for them. I might switch to Live Search some day. Google has it right, but pretty much any other search engine can too. If Google keeps going at this rate, I wouldn’t be surprised if many users drop it.
June 19th, 2007 at 5:02 pm
Great Post and excellent tools!
It is a shame that Google continues to dominate with no real competition in sight. I have always preferred Yahoo’s search results, myself. They seem to be the most relevant. Google’s search results are too heavily biased toward a web site’s back links. What you end up with are sites that have good links and usually are not what the searcher was hoping to find. Hopefully, the MSN - Yahoo merger will take place and offer some real competition, bettering search for all users.