Google conquers 2008 search market in U.S.
About 69.5 percent of Internet searches in the U.S. took place through Google during 2008, with search traffic increasing 8 percent over 2007, according to research firm Hitwise.
At whose expense was this growth? No surprise: Yahoo and Microsoft. Second-place Yahoo had 19.2 percent of the search volume, a drop of 11 percent from its year-earlier volume, while Microsoft accounted for 5.9 percent of the volume, a drop of 32 percent for the year, Hitwise said. Ask.com increased volume 1 percent to a share of 3.8 percent.
But looking at the story month-to-month, Microsoft fared better. "MSN Search has increased five months in a row now," Hitwise said, rising to 5.6 percent of the market in December.
Hitwise wasn't the only analysis firm to release market share numbers. On Wednesday, Nielsen Online issued its own, with broad agreement.
According to Nielsen, Google had 62.9 percent share in December, compared with 16.8 percent for Yahoo, 9.8 percent for Microsoft, 4.1 for AOL (which actually uses Google's results), and 2.0 for Ask.com.
Nielsen said the total number of searches in December was 8.6 billion in the U.S., up 19.6 percent from the year earlier.
Stephen Shankland writes about a wide range of technology and products, but has a particular focus on browsers and digital photography. He joined CNET News in 1998 and since then also has covered Google, Yahoo, servers, supercomputing, Linux and open-source software, and science. E-mail Stephen, or follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/stshank. 
- by jackdaniels08 January 15, 2009 4:33 PM PST
- Google is the goto search engine. They are always getting better and better. I love Google.
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