Market share? Options

[TheManBehindTheCurtain]

A colleague just quoted an article saying Google has a "33%" market share and Yahoo a "31%" market share. I'm trying to get the link.

There are a lot of ways to measure "market share":

-- Percentage of revenue from advertisers doing paid placements.

-- Percentage of traffic to web sites (people doing searches).

-- What others?

But to my mind, the question is: Should I be spending my money anywhere else besides Google? Those of you doing paid placements, excluding speciality industry lists, do you have a business case for Yahoo?

[supergrover]

for me yahoo is more of a b2c outlet. and google can be more b2b industry specific. that's just my thoughts

[rcjordan]

"According to Internet measurement firm Nielsen/NetRatings, MSN's share of the booming search-engine market jumped in February from 12.8 percent to 14.2 percent. That gain came at the expense of market leader Google (GOOG), which saw its share fall from 47.1 percent to 45.9 percent. (Yahoo (YHOO) held steady with a little more than 20 percent of the market.) "

http://www.business2.com/b2/web/articles/0...1044211,00.html


You can slice and dice the genre, niche, or countries involved and come up with different stats but these feel about right to me for US general search.

[TheManBehindTheCurtain]

Here's the article:

http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/bus...gy/11359282.htm

Quote:

[quote]While Google's name is still synonymous with search, Yahoo's search technology is considered by many to be at least as good as anybody's. And the Sunnyvale company has pulled close to its Mountain View-based competitor in search market share. U.S. Internet users went to Yahoo for 31 percent of their search queries in February, according to comScore Networks. Google captured 36 percent.[quote]

And it seems to depend on who's doing the counting.

[rcjordan]

Lies, damn lies, and statistics --Mark Twain
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A1091350


Note that the Nielsen one appears to be a 'headcount' while the Sunherald one is number of search queries. Portalized sites like Y and M are usually cited as doing well on the long and/or broad search traffic while G is more hit-n-run usage.

[bwelford]

That's OK, but some of us are apples, some of us are oranges and some of us are bananas.

What intrigues me here is that each search engine has its regular audience, some of whom use it always and some who use it in combination with other search engines. So if you're looking for the audience who may tend to do searches on say industrial plastic sheeting, their search practices may be quite different from the audience who is looking for mobile phone covers. For the industrial market, the search engine shares might be G 55%, M 20% and Y! 25% (looking only at the majors). For the mobile phone covers, the search engine shares might be G 35%, M 25% and Y! 40%.

What counts to a particular website owner is the search engine share for the group he or she is interested in. This may be very different from the overall average. After all you can't just lump all the fruit together.

[MrCrip]

Just look at the referrer information, I can have high positions in Google, Yahoo & MSN, however the traffic from Google is always head and shoulders above the rest.

I'd be thrilled to bits if Yahoo and MSN threw the same traffic amounts at my sites as Google does.

As far as I am concerned, it is not until a site appears in the higher reaches of Google that things start to happen. It's always nice to have the higher positions in MSN & Yahoo, but whats the point if they do not create business volume.

[travis]

In Australia, the traffic can be generalised as follows.

For every visit we get from Yahoo, we get 2 from MSN.

From every visit we get from MSN, we get 3 from Google.

Although some of our customers rank really well on Yahoo, the traffic generated from this engine is insignifiant. In the United States and England, the traffic on our customers from Yahoo is a little more useful, but in Australia, it just does not rate.

Everybody uses Google or Ninemsn ( whiich is actually msn.com)

Yahoo is a good directory, but an expensive one for the results it produces.

I just dont think Australians really bought the idea about Yahoo. Overture is unheard of over here. Its website looks nice, and promises the world and all these real world ROI's, but it is pure lies to advertise that website in Australia. They should have a different fron page in Australia. Overture - we hope someone will use it other than to find search phrases from our keyword tool.

Overture is the diet coke of search engines.

And Yahoo is the light beer.

MSN is full strength beer.

Google is the Black Sambuca