Google Still Hogs Search Share

Google is still the king of search, no matter who you listen to. According to figures released by Nielsen//NetRatings, more than 3 billion searches were conducted on Google in October, which was about 49.6% of the total search market, and marked a 23% growth over last year.

Yahoo! was second place, with about 1.46 billion searches in October, or about 23.9% of the market, which was a 30% growth over last year.

MSN/Windows Live was third with 538.6 million searches in October, or about 8.8% of the market, which was an 8% decrease from last year.

AOL was fourth with 6.2% of the market, and Ask.com was fifth with 2.8% of the market according to Nielsen//NetRatings.

Numbers released by comScore painted a slightly different picture. According to the online metrics firm, Google was top dog with about 45.4% of all queries conducted in the U.S., while Yahoo! was second with 28.2% of all searches in October. MSN was third with 11.7% of the market.

However, comScore places Ask.com at the fourth spot with 5.8% of the search market, while AOL is fifth with 5.4% of the market.

Nielsen//NetRatings indicates that MSN was the only major search engine to see a decrease in market share from last year, while comScore indicates that MSN, Yahoo!, and AOL have all declined from last year’s figures.

Sources:

http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3624005

http://www.informationweek.com/research/showArticle.
jhtml?articleID=194700059