Sourced from eMarketer
A total of 4,085,880 searches were conducted by US at-home and at-work users in January 2005, and Google accounted for 47% percent of them, maintaining its place as the top search engine. Yahoo! accounted for 21% of searches, and MSN for 13%. The remaining 19% occurred on the sixty other search sites surveyed by Nielsen.
An article we send last year reported Google sitting at around the 40% mark…
While these rankings seem clear cut, Nielsen’s survey reveals that there is plenty of overlap between the search engines. For example, while Google had almost 71 million unique searchers in January 2005, over 41 million of them also used one of the other top three search sites. Put another way, even though it is the market leader, 58% of those who used Google also used another search engine. Ken Cassar, Director, Strategic Analysis at Nielsen//NetRatings, explains: “While it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Google is the search engine to beat, it is critical that all of the major search players, including Google, recognise that they exclusively own only a minority of their users. This highlights an opportunity and a threat to all of the established players in the market, and underscores the importance of continued innovation in a highly competitive market that is anything but mature.”
Indeed, like Google, only a minority of visitors to Yahoo! and MSN use those search engines exclusively. Yahoo! attracted about two-thirds as many unique searchers as Google, but 71% of them also used Google or MSN. Similarly, MSN drew just over 40 million unique searchers, but 70% also used Google or Yahoo!.
Nevertheless, even factoring in sharing, Google is still clearly the leading engine. Not only did a greater percentage of its users use it solely compared to Yahoo! and MSN, but the biggest chunk of MSN’s and Yahoo!’s users who also went to a different search engine went to Google. For example, of the 71% of traffic that Yahoo! shared, 39% went to Google, and 21% went to both Google and MSN, with the remaining 11% going to just MSN.
Google’s advantage is not surprising, as its reputation among US consumers is quite good. In a study by Keynote Systems, Google was ranked the top search engine, above Yahoo!, MSN, Ask Jeeves and Lycos, although Keynote points out that Yahoo! and MSN’s rankings improved fast enough to gain ground on Google. In fact, according to the study, the number of users that consider Yahoo! their primary search engine increased by 20% since June 2004, and MSN saw an increase of 30% in the number of users who use it primarily. Moreover, the percentage of Yahoo! and MSN users who said they would come back to these sites increased since the previous survey in June 2004.
The search engine market remains competitive, with innovation the key. The latest buzz surrounds local search and desktop search, and all sites continue to refine their paid search systems, a large revenue source. However, in eMarketer’s Search Engine Marketing report, Senior Analyst David Hallerman notes that search engines need to be cautious: “For the past few years, many search engines have been able to rake in the dollars just by offering space for paid search ads. But to build areas for additional growth, most notably forms of local and vertical search, much more hand-holding will be required. That will be true at every step of the game — selling your services to start with, and supporting your customers in their efforts to figure out what works and what doesn’t. Oh yes: Don’t kill the golden goose with graphic ads, banners or rich media. Internet users like search, and accept sponsored listings, simply because the pages are not cluttered and intrusive.”