Yesterday I asked whether Yahoo had given up hopes of hanging on in the ‘battle’ of the Search Engine. Since then, Nielsen has released the latest U.S. Search Engine usage stats for May 2009. Interestingly, there has been a 20% increase in the number of searches from a year ago.
The data as provided by Nielsen is given in the table below; note how Google handles nearly 2/3 of all searches and how their market share has grown by 28% year on year. The number of searches with Yahoo has also increased substantially however Windows Live Search have provided 15% less searches than May 2008 (it can be seen why Microsoft HAD to replace Live Search).
| Provider | Searches (000) | YOY Growth | Share of Searches |
| All Search | 9,440,467 | 20.3% | 100.0% |
| Google Search | 5,968,840 | 28.2% | 63.2% |
| Yahoo! Search | 1,625,253 | 22.3% | 17.2% |
| MSN/Windows Live Search | 891,502 | -14.6% | 9.4% |
| AOL Search | 364,784 | 13.1% | 3.9% |
| Ask.com Search | 205,438 | 21.9% | 2.2% |
| My Web Search | 77,283 | 44.7% | 0.8% |
| Comcast Search | 55,853 | 33.1% | 0.6% |
| Yellow Pages Search | 33,141 | n/a* | 0.4% |
| NexTag Search | 27,189 | 29.9% | 0.3% |
| AT&T Worldnet Search | 17,719 | -32.4% | 0.2% |
It will be interesting to see in a years time as to whether Wolfram Alpha appears as a significant Search Engine (even although Wolfram Alpha insist they are an ‘Answer Engine’ rather than a ‘Search Engine’). I predict that Yahoo Search will see year on year Search declines whereas Bing will see significant growth in Search. I still believe that Google will maintain or even grow their share of Searches.
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