I get those emails from Hitwise which calls itself the "leading online competitive intelligence service" (not sure what happened to Comscore and Nielsen and anyone else) regularly - usually they're not all that interesting and seem to just say that Google wins and everyone else should get out of Search - well, sorta.
However, with Google Receives 67 Percent of U.S. Searches in March 2008 an interesting dynamic has been detected - Ask.com will probably overtake MSN and become the #3 Search Engine by the end of the year - that's unusual.
Google accounted for 67.25 percent of all U.S. searches in the four weeks ending March 29, 2008. Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com each received 20.29, 5.25 and 4.09 percent respectively. The remaining 46 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.72 percent of U.S. searches.
Percentage of U.S.Searches Among Leading Search Engine Providers
Domain
Mar.-08
Feb.-08
Mar.-07
www.google.com
67.25%
66.44%
64.13%
search.yahoo.com
20.29%
20.59%
21.26%
search.msn.com
6.65%*
6.95%*
9.01%*
www.ask.com
4.09%
4.16%
3.48%
Note: Data is based on four week rolling periods (ending 3/29.08, 2/23/08, 3/31/07) from the Hitwise sample of 10 million US Internet users.
* - includes executed searches on Live.com and MSN Search.
Source: Hitwise
It's even more interesting in that MSN is trying to acquire Yahoo - which at last check (today) isn't going according to plan with Yahoo Rejecting Microsoft Bid Again according to the New York Times.
I also found the chart below interesting, but not for the reasons HitWise presents:
U.S. Category Upstream Traffic from Search Engines and Google - March 2008 | ||||
| Category | Percent of Category Traffic from Search Engines, Mar-08 | Percent Change in Share of Traffic From Search Engines, Mar-08 - Mar-07 | Percent of Category Traffic from Google, Mar-08 | Percent Change in Share of Traffic From Google, Mar-08 - Mar-07 |
| Health and Medical | 45.10% | 4% | 29.80% | 5% |
| Travel | 33.42% | 9% | 22.82% | 21% |
| Shopping and Classifieds | 25.35% | 0% | 16.44% | 7% |
| News and Media | 21.54% | 2% | 14.21% | 5% |
| Entertainment | 23.99% | 14% | 15.26% | 18% |
| Business and Finance | 18.17% | 15% | 11.64% | 28% |
| Sports | 12.93% | 14% | 8.58% | 21% |
| All figures are based on U.S. data from the Hitwise sample of 10 million Internet users. | ||||
| Source: Hitwise | ||||
What I'm interested in is not the part of the industry traffic that Google gets - but that someone has defined what the average traffic from search engines to industry verticals are.
I would wish for this information to be integrated with Google Analytics Trending - so far, there's been some movement in providing customized trend data in GA, but it's been limited.
And as far ask Ask.com moving ahead of Microsoft Search, one has to wonder it Search is really what it's about anyway - a company like Microsoft might be focused on so many things besides search, that it might not be able to make changes quick enough - there may be too many layers of change control in order to get anything done (being more conservative - and then people who would want to make changes, give up).
Right now, I'd expect Ask.com to overtake MSN as early as year's end.
Only 67% for Google? In Europe Google's market share is around 90% so I really hope that the Microsoft/Yahoo deal goes through in order to create some serious competition for Google.
Posted by: wetten | April 8, 2008 2:56 PM | Permalink to Comment