Add to del.icio.us     Digg this

April 12, 2007

Hitwise has the latest search market share numbers and for the four weeks ended March 31, Google had over a 64 percent overall market share of all U.S. searches done in that period.

These numbers are up more than 10 percent since March of last year. If this trend maintains itself, Google’s market share will even surpass the 70 percent treshold by October 2007.

For the same corresponding period, Yahoo, MSN Live and Ask.com all lost in their respective share portion of the search market.

This certainly isn't good news for some, particularly as it covers a period when all of the major search players made important and costly improvements to their engines.

For instance, Ask.com launched an impressive local search service last year, and also greatly improved its image searching. However, and despite all that, its overall market share still declined almost 0.45 percent, to a tiny 3.49 percent.

No matter how you cut it, tradional wisdom has long held that Google is still vulnerable to what are called 'vertical attacks' (specific search engines that single out category niches).

But as the new Hitwise data suggests, Google is somehow gaining some influence in specific valuable vertical markets.

Overall, search engines increased their so-called influence over the year, accounting for more of the total traffic sent to Web sites in the categories of travel, health, shopping, business and even entertainment, among others.

But in all categories, the growth of Google’s market share of this upstream traffic flow largely outpaced that of its rivals.

For instance, in the shopping segment, Google’s share grew about 13.9 percent while all other search engines increased their share in that sector by less than 5.9 percent.

Some say these numbers should be taken with a grain of salt. After all, Internet market share numbers are notoriously fallible, and these will certainly require further analyzis.

But at the same time, people desperate for any sign of some weakness in Google may take some consolation in a recent PC Magazine critique of Gmail.

Add to del.icio.us     Digg this

    This article was featured on Business 5.0.

Source: CNN Money