Google's market share tops 65 percent

Google may not have monopoly power, but it certainly has monopoly mind share. As The New York Times reports, Google's search market share has jumped from 58 percent in March 2006 to 65.1 percent today. Yahoo? Less than one-third of Google's share. Microsoft? Less than one-ninth.

Monopoly? Not in the ordinary sense of the word. Google may well be aiming for a data monopoly to keep us close forever and ever, but for now it just has a brand monopoly that keeps users on its site, feeding it ever-increasing mountains of data.

We are feeding the beast, in other words. Whether it turns out to be a benevolent or malignant beast, however, is out of our hands. An interesting quagmire...

[eccles1214]

I find it both interesting and a bit alarming that Google is heading the way that Microsoft treaded so long ago . . . that of becoming a near monopoly. Of course, it is those users who are using Google worldwide that are doing this. The more people use Google the more its market share grows, and as Matt says, the more data is gets to profile its users.
I think among the reasons people keep using Google are 1) because of the ubiquity of its presence (all those "Ads by Google" help keep the name Google in our collective consciousness and remind us to use it as a search engine), 2) because like mindless herds of sheep, people use Google because other people are using Google and because their friends, coworkers, bosses, spouses, children are using Google, 3) supposedly relevant and more appropriate results. Fortunately (for me at least), I rarely use Google, but not because of its data mining practices (after all, Yahoo and Microsoft do it, too), but because Google no longer gives me relevant results for my searches. Because so many people keep duking it out over placing their links highest in Google, I find that most of my searches end of being junk searches filled with either junk words or somebody's commercial link. I prefer non-commercial sources or more authoritative sources of information, and these are harder and harder to come by on Google. So I've stopped using it, and instead I rotate my searches through Yahoo, Live, Clusty, Exalead, Ask, Anoox, Mamma, Gigablast, and a host of other smaller web searches engines. Not only is it a pleasure to find information right away (that I probably would have found on some page buried deep within a Google search), but more and more often I am finding information that Google's database doesn't index. For example, I recently did a search for a particular item for my car: Google came up empty handed, but AlltheWeb (a Yahoo website) found 8 sources. So Google is not always the fastest or most complete nor most relevant search, but people are mentally convinced that it is. Just like people are convinced that Word and Excel are the best spreadsheet despite their being better programs out there. Looks like a VHS vs. Betamax, BlueRay vs. DVDHD issue. And the best doesn't always win, the most popular system (even if it is the inferior one in the long run) wins. Yuck.

[Tony McCune]

Google is often the freshest by far. When I launched a site back in the spring (www.digitalchalk.com) we got indexed within a few hours by Google but it took Yahoo SIX WEEKS to find us. I even PAID them $150 (what was I thinking) to get us indexed but without any timely results.

[Tony McCune]

I use Google, Mahalo and Yahoo with a little bit of wikipedia mixed in. How can they possible measure search market share (or better yet, define it)?

[markawatson]

As I remember, from high school economics (which for me was admittedly a long time ago), the UK government (at least) defined the requirement for a monopoly as 25% of market share (to trigger either some kind of investigation, or a review of a potential merger.

[daemonizeeee]

You can try http://umibozu.net maybe , results are driven by users themselves and is less prone to monoply.