Google posted a considerable growth in the number of searches done in March 2008 over the year, according to the monthly report on search engine shares released by Neilsen-Netratings. Though there is a slight raise in the number of searches done through Yahoo, there is a clear decline in Yahoo search engine market share when compared to March 2007’s performance. MSN performed better when compared to previous month and also over the year, both in the market share and the number of searches in March 2008.
Google is comprehensively dominant in the search engines market shares and the number of searches done in US as well. Google occupies 58.70% of the search engine market share which is the new high for the Internet market giant, according to Neilsen-Netratings. There is also a considerable growth in the number of searches in Google since December 2007, which helped in cementing its position as the top search engine. Google posted 4.8 billion searches in the month of March 2008, which is 25.5% more than the searches done in March 2007.
Though Yahoo looked fair enough in sustaining the number of searches from the previous month, it is clearly loosing market share when compared to March 2007. The search engine market share of Yahoo stands at 18% according to Neilsen-Netratings, which is 3.80% less when compared to March 2007 where it scored a decent 21.8 percent.
MSN windows live search is showing a positive growth in both the number of searches and search engine market share when compared to March 2007 results. In March 2008 in the search engine shares, Microsoft scored 12% gaining 0.80% when compared to the previous month, according to Neilsen-Netratings. The year-over-year market share was also encouraging, as there is an increase of 19.80%, when compared to March 2007. The number of searches also increased from the previous month as well as from the same month in 2007 with 36.63% growth.
AOL despite powered by Google is also gradually loosing market share and also the total number of searches. There is sharp decline in the market share by 1.10% from the total search engine market from the previous month share of 5.20%. With this AOL is the biggest looser of market share in the month of March. The number of searches through AOL is also disappointing as there is a decline of 19.38% from March 2007. As AOL is powered by Google, when the two market shares are combined, it becomes 62.80% declining from 63.90% in the previous month.
In a similar report released by Comscore, the total number of searches conducted by the US citizens in March 2008 stood at 10.8 billion which is almost a billion searches more than the searches done in the previous month. When it comes to the number of searches per day in March 2008, 157.7 million searches were done only on Google from a total of 265.8 million done in US, which clearly says that Google is the dominant player in the search engine markets.
Google search occupies the largest market share and has been increasing gradually. Yahoo is clearly struggling to maintain the market share and Microsoft has increased market share slightly. But at 18% and 12% respectively, they are way below Google’s market share. Major search engines increased market share at the cost of smaller search engines like Ask.com. If you were worrying about how to submit your website to thousands of search engines, you can relax it may not be required. The top 5 search engines account for an overwhelming 95% of the market share.
