Jan 17th, 2007
Search Engine Market Share
Have you ever wondered which search engines are the most popular? Which are getting used the most?
I don’t think it comes as a surprise to anyone that Google is the biggest search engine out there with 47.3% of search engine usage. In a way, this number is at least 5% over what comscore says it is because there are other small search engines out there that use Google’s search in their engines. Oh, and Google is still growing.
Yahoo comes in second with 28.5% of the market share.
MSN or Live comes in 3rd with 10.4% of the market share. Sadly, MSN is still on a trend downward. I say sadly, but really, I’m kind of tired of Microsoft dominating the world. I think we should give someone else a turn….like Google.
All other search engines are significantly smaller than these three with Ask.com in 4th place.
Yeah, I’ve noticed that each of the measurement services give different numbers for the exact percentage marketshare each search engine has, but it’s clear who’s #1, 2, & 3. It hasn’t always been like that, though. When I got started in this business, there really were 10 or 12 unique search engines that actually mattered. Of course the total search volume was tiny compared to now…and Google wasn’t one of them. There was Lycos, Northern Light, Altavista, Infoseek, HotBot, Excite, Webcrawler…all of which are now just distant memories. There have been others that showed up in the top 10 for a while like iWon, NBCi/Snap, Looksmart. Ah, the good old days.
The consolidation of search traffic is a blessing and a curse–in some ways it’s nice because it’s much easier to just worry about 3 search engines that happen to index sites very similarly, but if you don’t show up in those three, you’re pretty much hosed. Before at least you had plenty of different search engines, you should show up in at least one of them for some of your keywords!