Google's share of the U.S. search market increased as its growth outpaced that of the market overall, according to new statistics from Nielsen Online.
The overall search market grew 16.7 percent to 9.5 billion searches from March 2008 to March 2009. Google's share of that grew 27.6 percent to 6.1 billion, Nielsen said Friday.
Yahoo, in second place, saw growth of 1.7 percent to 1.5 billion. Microsoft's grew 0.3 percent to about 982 million.
Overall, Google held 64.2 percent share to Yahoo's 15.8 percent and Microsoft's 10.3 percent.
Here are the full year-over-year (YOY) growth statistics from Nielsen:
Google is the leading search engine, but most people use others, too.
(Credit: Forrester)Despite Google's dominance of online search in the U.S., the company still isn't the only player in town.
A study by Forrester found that 55 percent use more than one search engine per week, and that 20 percent of searchers use only Google.
"Users find that other search engines are actually more effective for certain things--like looking up stock quotes or finding news stories," said analyst Shar VanBoskirk in the study.
According to the study, 69 percent of people use Google at least weekly, compared to 50 percent for Yahoo, 18 percent for AOL, and 14 percent for Microsoft.
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.
Google's search share encroached on rivals, rising 0.4 percentage points to 63.5 percent from October to November.
(Credit: ComScore)Correction at 5:50 a.m. Monday: This story had an incorrect total for U.S. searches in November. The total was 12.3 billion.
Google grabbed a chunk of market share from rival search engines in the United States in November, new figures from ComScore show.
Google's share increased 0.4 percentage points to 63.5 percent from October to November, while Yahoo dropped 0.1 percentage points to 20.4 percent and Microsoft dropped 0.2 percentage points to 8.3 percent.
Further down the pecking order, Ask.com dropped 0.2 percentage points to 4.0 percent and AOL rose 0.1 percent to 3.8 percent, ComScore said.
The total searches performed dropped 3 percent to 12.3 billion, though, so even Google lost out in absolute terms even as it gained share. Each search holds the potential to show search ads, so the query total is financially significant.
Search queries served by Yahoo's BOSS service have been steadily growing since the program's July launch.
(Credit: Yahoo)Yahoo's BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service), which lets others use the company's search technology, is getting some traction.
The service, announced in July, now handles 10 million queries per day, Yahoo announced Monday. And with Google still king of the heap, and Microsoft breathing down Yahoo's neck, the company needs every scrap of influence it can get in the search market.
"We believe growing to more than 100 queries a second in just over 5 months says something about the demand for an open search platform," Bill Michels of the BOSS Team said in a blog post.
"As a point of reference, the total queries from these developer-built, BOSS-powered search engines would rank ahead of the combined searches done on both Facebook and Amazon, and just behind Ask.com," Michels said, citing ComScore statistics.
BOSS queries don't count toward Yahoo's market share, but they could help the company out. That's because heavy-traffic partners using the search infrastructure must either show Yahoo search ads or sign some form of revenue-sharing partnership.
More changes will come to BOSS next year, including the revenue-sharing initiative. "Since launch, we've been focused on adding features and building up the ecosystem. We'll maintain that emphasis in 2009, as well as adding monetizing capabilities to the platform," Michels said.
With BOSS, partners get extensive leeway with Yahoo search results. They may reorder them, mix them with their own results, or filter out particular results, for example. Yahoo handles much of the heavy lifting, including crawling the Web, indexing the pages, and delivering the search results through the BOSS API (application programming interface).
(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.
Apparently there's nothing like a crisis to get people to check financial Web sites.
(Credit: ComScore)Yahoo is falling victim to the current economic woes, with analysts lowering forecasts for the company's financial future and layoffs in the works. But one part of the company is all but chortling with glee: Yahoo Finance.
According to ComScore's latest statistics, Yahoo is king of the heap, with 19.9 million unique users in the month of September, an all-time high for the site, according to Yahoo. I'm guessing that's going to look small once we see the October statistics, too.
Nowhere in the top 10 is Google Finance. Disclosure: No. 8, though, is BNET, part of CBS Interactive, which operates CNET News.
It's a familiar pattern: another month, another increase in Google's search market share.
Internet users performed 11.7 billion searches in the U.S. in August, choosing Google 63 percent of the time, according to ComScore's monthly analysis released Thursday. That's an increase of 1.1 percentage points from 61.9 percent in July, the analyst firm said.
Yahoo slipped from 20.5 percent to 19.6 percent, and Microsoft slipped from 8.9 percent to 8.3 percent.
It appears that nearly 2 million people in the United States downloaded Google's new Chrome Web browser in its first week of availability, Nielsen Online said Wednesday.
Nielsen, which bases its statistics on the behavior of a panel of Internet users, said that from September 1 to September 7, 1.93 million people visited the Google "Thank You" page associated with the download process.
The online chatter about Google's browser surged to more than half the remarkable level of Apple's iPhone, Nielsen said. This chart shows the percentage of blog postings and other online commentary that mentioned Chrome.
(Credit: Nielsen Online)That's nearly 1.4 percent of all U.S. Internet users, Nielsen said. That may sound small, but it's a pretty good response for a beta version of a product that most people don't need, since so far, it only refines the familiar activity of using the Web.
Of course, getting people to try Chrome is easier than getting them to switch, but Google appears determined to push the open-source browser as hard as possible. On Tuesday, the company began a program to let people get the latest Chrome updates.
The buzz followed on the heels of the launch, according to Nielsen's measurement of Chrome mentions on blogs, discussion boards, and other online forums.
"The interest in all things Google was apparent in the online discussion surrounding the somewhat-unexpected Chrome launch," said Jon Stewart, research director of technology and search at Nielsen Online. "The browser was mentioned in nearly 1 percent of all online discussions the day after its launch--a respectable slightly-more-than-half of what the highly anticipated iPhone 3G generated when it launched earlier this summer."
(Credit:
Nielsen Online)
Google's quantity searches in the United States during July surged 16 percent over the last year, cementing the company's lead at the top of the market, according to statistics released Tuesday by Nielsen Online.
Google had 60 percent of the 8 billion searches in the month, Nielsen said. Yahoo, whose searches dropped 11 percent, had 17.4 percent of the market, and Microsoft, whose searches dropped 10 percent, had 11.9 percent of the market.
The overall search tally increased 3 percent from July 2007 to July 2008, the company said. Nielsen bases its statistics on the behavior of a panel of Internet users.
AOL's search queries dropped 9 percent over the year, leaving it with 4.6 percent share, and Ask.com's rose 13 percent, leaving it with 2 percent share, Nielsen said.
