Google Steals Search Share From Rivals

Extending its dominance in the search market, Google grew its share of queries in April at the expense of rivals Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL and Ask.com.


Google Steals Search Share From Rivals

Google's U.S. search query share in April grew to 61.6 percent, up from 59.8 percent in March, comScore announced Thursday. Google accomplished this although the number of search queries dropped 2 percent overall in April to 10.58 billion, compared with March, comScore said.
So even with the overall monthly decline, Google managed to increase its search queries by 1 percent, from 6.44 billion to 6.51 billion.

Meanwhile, the other four major search-engine players saw their queries and their market share drop in April, compared with March, not a great situation for them to be in, considering that search advertising accounts for about 41 percent of U.S. online advertising, according to the latest report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).

Yahoo's market share of queries dropped to 20.4 percent, and its number of queries fell 6 percent. Microsoft's market share shrunk to 9.1 percent, while its queries fell 5 percent. AOL, down to a 4.6 percent share, saw its queries drop by 6 percent. Ask.com, whose share slid to 4.3 percent, had the biggest fall in queries percentage-wise with 9 percent.

A desire to improve its position in search was a primary driver for Microsoft's now-abandoned acquisition bid for Yahoo. However, Microsoft is reportedly trying to strike a search deal with Yahoo, which is also in similar negotiations with Google. It's not clear whether Yahoo would be open to selling its search-advertising business outright or instead seek a deal to outsource part of it to Microsoft or Google.

Whatever happens, comScore's figures for April leave no doubt that Microsoft and Yahoo have resoundingly failed to slow down Google in search, and that Google remains well-positioned to use its search dominance to continue boosting its revenue and profits.

In a research note commenting on the comScore report, Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney wrote: "As Google continues to take share, we continue to believe a deal between Yahoo and Microsoft would be necessary -- though not sufficient -- to compete effectively with Google."

The Search Wikia

The widely-awaited open-source search engine, from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, makes it debut today.

Wikia Search Engine Goes Live Today

Search Wikia, the widely-awaited search engine from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, is slated to make its official debut today, Monday. It's been said that this open-source, community-driven search engine will eventually place it in competition with Google.

The search engine is still in very early alpha stage, and users who want to test-drive the engine shouldn't expect a Google-killer. It still needs time, and will need participation from volunteers to grow and be refined, Wales said.

With that in mind, Search Wikia is expected to be developed and refined, similarly to Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia written and edited by a community of volunteer collaborators, who have expanded it and improved it over the years.

"Search Wikia is an extremely alpha project. It's a project to build a search engine and not a full-fledged competitor to Google yet. We want to make sure people understand that it's in its very early days," Wales said.

Wales expects the project to provide an alternative to commercial search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft.

"I don't know how long it will take to reach industry-standard quality search results, but I'd say at least two years," he said.

People interested in volunteering will find a variety of options at Search Wikia, including working with the software to improve and extend it, as well as suggesting pages for the index and evaluating and rating search results.

Those who register to participate in the project will join a social networking environment where they can have a list of friends, upload photos, build profiles and be notified of friends' actions.

Users of the search engine will be presented with what Wales calls a "mini article" at the top of the results list. This can be a photo, a text definition, an external link or whatever else has been determined is the best answer to that particular query.

Below the "mini article" will be the list of results, picked from the Search Wikia index, which on Monday will have anywhere between 50 million and 100 million Web pages. Wales concedes that number is small, but said it will continue to grow over time.

Users will be able to rank the quality of individual search results, and Search Wikia will factor in that feedback when solving future queries. "That way, people will be able to influence the algorithmic search results," he said.

Those who try to abuse the system for, say, search engine spamming purposes, are bound to be quickly noticed by administrators and other community members, and they will swiftly be blocked and banned, Wales said.

Google Yourself!

Have you Googled your name lately? A research firm made a survey on how many people are doing a Google Search on their names.

Go Ahead, Google Yourself
Have you Googled yourself lately? A survey made by Pew Internet and American Life Project said that there's a good chance you have.

The survey found that 47 percent of Internet users have searched for themselves through Google, an increase from 22 percent in 2002. Only 3 percent of those searching for themselves on Google claim to do it on a regular basis, with 22 percent claiming to search for themselves "every once in a while." A majority of 74 percent said they have searched for themselves once or twice.

Another interesting tidbit from the Pew survey is 53 percent of Internet users have Googled someone else’s name. Reasons include reconnecting with past friends (36 percent), searching about a coworker (19 percent) or a job applicant (11 percent), or even finding information about someone they are dating (9 percent).

Not included in the survey is the statistic that approximately 100 percent of those who read about the survey will Google their own name just to see what all the fuss is about. I of course did, and was both disappointed and relieved to find no information about myself.

While it's nice to know Google gawkers can't pull up anything on me if they tried, there's a strange emptiness to not having a digital footprint.

The Pew survey found that 60 percent of Internet users are not concerned with how much information is available online about them. A similar number of online adults (61 percent) claimed not to limit the amount of personal information they reveal online, while only 38 percent claimed to have taken extra precautions to limit that information.

Source: http://www.pcworld.com/

The Google Edge

Google extended its lead in web searches, ComScore says.

Google Remains On Top of Web Searches

Google still remains on the top of the pack, with still increasing share of internet search engine market in October. According to market researcher ComScore, Google broadened its lead over its rivals Yahoo and Microsoft by winning 58.5 percent of all US searches in October, an increase of 1.5 percentage points over September.

Yahoo took second place with 22.9 percent of the search market, down from 23.7 percent, while third ranked Microsoft dropped to 9.7 percent from 10.3 percent. Ask Network remained steady at fourth place with 4.7 percent of the U.S. search market in October, while Time Warner Network dropped a tad to 4.2 percent from 4.3 percent a month earlier, ComScore reported.

Google captured 6.1 billion of the 10.5 billion Internet searches Americans conducted in October, ComScore said, far more than second place Yahoo's 2.4 billion.

Leading Search Engines - October 2007

• Google: 58.5 percent (+1.5 points)
• Yahoo: 22.9 percent (-0.8 points)
• Microsoft: 9.7 percent (-0.6 points)
• Ask Networ: 4.7 percent (no change)
• Time Warner Network: 4.2 percent -0.1 points)

Source: ComScore. (The company only counted search engines with nearly 5 percent or more of the search market in its survey.)