Google's U.S. search share edges upward

(Credit: Paul Ford)

United States Internet users conducted 2 percent fewer searches in October 2008 than the year earlier, but used Google more often for those searches, according to data Nielsen Online released Tuesday.

The total number of searches decreased 2 percent to 7.78 billion for the U.S., Nielsen said. Google's searches increased 8.1 percent to 4.76 billion for the month, giving the company a 61.2 percent share of the market.

Search is a profitable business for Google, which shows textual advertisements based on the search query terms, and Yahoo and Microsoft in particular are trying to match as closely as possible. Those companies didn't fare as well, though.

Yahoo's searches declined 12 percent annually to 1.31 billion and Microsoft's declined 19 percent annually to 89 million, Nielsen said.

In September, all three of the major search companies had more search queries in the U.S, according to Nielsen. For that month, Google had 4.83 billion searches, Yahoo 1.46 billion searches, and Microsoft 95 million searches. The total that month was 8.09 billion.

[dwinks]

What is far more interesting than Google having 61.2 percent is the fact that 38.8 percent of people used something else. Most of the time when I use something other than google is when I type into the search box on someone else's computer (when doing IT work on their computer, for instance), and it's always either Yahoo or Live search. Almost every time after I hit enter and the results pop up, I look at them, am usually disgusted by the complete crap results, and then head to www.google.com and search again.

Now, don't get me wrong, I am not a fan-boy, nor would I have any reason to use Google, if they weren't by far better. If a "Google-killer" comes along, I will be one of the first to switch, as finding what I want, fast, with as little ads or other crap as possible is all that I care about.

[martin1212]

I don't believe that Microsoft number. I bet the author here mixed up his numbers and is off by a factor of 10, it's probably 890 million rather than 89 million. Same for the 95 million number.