May 29, 2006

A new report reveals that Google accounted for half of all US searches conducted in April, according to research firm Nielsen/NetRatings.

Google was followed by Yahoo and MSN, with 21.9 percent and 11.1 percent, respectively.

But Nielsen/NetRatings said that Google isn't the leading Web portal in the US, nor does it control the social networking scene.

According to Nielsen, Google has gained an additional 3 percent market share during the previous twelve months. This isn't much, but still enough to conclude that "Google Mania" is far from over.

This doesn’t mean that all should be doom an gloom at Yahoo and Microsoft headquarters either. Search activity continues to increase and according to NetRatings, Yahoo boosted its number of searches over 27 percent in 2005, and MSN by about 10 percent.

Still, Google is the champion with a growth of 34 percent year over year-- impressive numbers nevertheless.

In a related announcement, NetRatings said that April’s top 10 social networking sites collectively grew 47 percent year over year, “increasing from an unduplicated unique audience of 46.8 million last year to 68.8 million in April 2006, reaching 45 percent of active Web users.”

Social networking sites are sites that allow users to upload and comment on content. This is interesting also from a search engine viewpoint, as these sites are heavy producers of content, the stuff the search engines thrive on.

Note also that companies like Google, Yahoo and now MSN use contextual text ads to generate revenue, and such sites may be used to present advertising.

Amongst the most popular social networking sites are MySpace, Blogger, Classmates Online, the brand new video forum YouTube, MSN Groups, AOL Hometown, Yahoo Groups, Six Apart TypePad and Xanga, a tool for online diaries (listed in order of popularity).

This is, interestingly enough, not an area dominated by Google, although Google owns number 2 on the list: the online blogging tool Blooger.com. However, Google Groups is not on the list, and Google Video is clearly beaten by YouTube.

Nielsen said if you measure the number of visitors to brand Web sites, thus counting the number of visits to Yahoo web sites (Yahoo Mail included), instead of the number of searches only, the numbers again confirm that Google is not the obvious US leader.

According to NetRatings, Yahoo had the most popular set of websites in April, with a unique audience of 105 million. Microsoft.com was number 2, msn.com — another Microsoft property — number 3 and Google.com number 4, with an audience of about 92 million.

The increasing importance of text ads actually make Google struggle to get control over the non-search part of this market. Google is now considered by many as a portal and may have some catching up to do.

Source: Pandia