Google Market Share Grows Year After Year
Google is clearly the #1 search engine and is gaining popularity with impressive market share. According to ComScore, in June 2008 Google accounted for 61.5% of core searches in the US, followed by Yahoo! at 20.9% and Microsoft at 9.2%. Core searches are defined as those searches performed on the five major engines: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, and Ask.
Even more interesting is the trends happening in the US market share. Google continues to increase its market share in the US at the expense of rivals Yahoo! and Microsoft. In the last 3 years, Google has moved from a 36.5% market share (June 2005) to a 61.5% market share (June 2008). This is a 68% increase in market share. During this same period, Yahoo! fell from 30.4% to 20.9% share; Microsoft fell from 15.5% to a 9.2% share.
The total number of searches performed has risen sharply during the same time. There were 11.5 billion searches performed during June 2008 on the core search engines (US).
According to Neilsen Net Ratings (Nov 2007) there are 218,302,574 Internet users in the US. This is equal to 71.9% of the total US population. This also means that the average Internet user performed 53 searches on one of the core search engines during June 2008. This is up from 43 searches just 9 months earlier (Sep 2007).
Google is increasing both its market share and its number of total searches at a very consistent rate. The average number of searches per month made by the average Internet user is also steadily increasing. This means a sound web traffic strategy focused on Google is extremely important for every business that has a website today.