Google Increases Search Market Share

InformationWeek reports that web searches increase by over 50% in Decemeber. During that month Google gained more market share over its rivals Yahoo and Microsoft.
Among the top three search engines, Google was the only one to gain market share, rising 5.7 percent year-to-year to 48.8 percent. No. 2 Yahoo Inc., on the other hand, saw its market share dip by 0.3 percent to 21.4 percent, while Microsoft Corp.'s MSN experienced a 3.1 percent drop to 14 percent.

While Google grabbed market share at the expense of Yahoo, MSN and smaller search engines, its two biggest rivals still did well in increasing the number of searches on their sites, even though the number of people online increased only a bit, Cassar said. Searches on Google jumped 75 percent in the month to 2.5 billion, Yahoo 53 percent to 1.1 billion and MSN 20 percent to 553 million.

In general, the use of search is increasing because search engines are doing a better job at delivering relevant results and at making available content that wasn't on the Web before, such as music and video. Google has been the most aggressive in getting offline content in its index, Cassar said, pointing to the company's initiative to digitize library books, a project that has been challenged in the courts by writers and authors claiming the project violates their copyrights. The lawsuits are pending.
Google is trouncing its competitors in the battle for search leadership. Yahoo has been acquiring other web search and browsing tools like Flickr and Del.icio.us/ but so far they are still losing ground to Google.

Posted on February 14, 2006





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