US Search Market Share September 2007

Nielsen Netratings report on the US search market share for September 2007. The results are in....Let's have a look at the top performing search engines and their metrics compared to past reports.

Click to Enlarge the Market Share Chart Image

Google remains top dog in the search game, showing a very small increase over August 07 market share results. Their year over year (YOY) growth is 41.3%, showing a slight increase over last months 39.8% as well. Google checks in with a falling 3,994,158 searches in September, a small decrease from last month of 205,337 searches performed. However, despite Yahoo's effort and innovation Google had 63.9% more searches in September. This is still increasing, as they grabbed 62.8% more of the total searches than Yahoo in August.

Yahoo, still losing market share and has lost .4% market share compared to the August report. They are showing 19.5% of the search market share for September...While last month they came in at 19.9%. This is in fact a negligible amount, but I expected to see an increase here. Yahoo is actually down 118,658 (7.6%) total searches from last month. Their YOY (year over year) however, is up over last month showing 9.3% growth.

MSN / Live is looking pretty stable with a 12.0% of the search market share, which has fallen from last month...But only a very small .9%. MSN / Live was able to grab 890,658 of the total searches for September, which is a loss of 120,713 total searches. That number would not make much of a difference to Google, but for MSN / Live it is a 11.9% loss. MSN / Live is showing a gigantic 71.5% growth in YOY (year over year). Which is up from last months YOY growth by 1.7%.

AOL search continues to out do Ask.com, checking in at 6.0% of the search market share, a .4% share growth from August reporting. At 444,493 searches for September, they are genuinely killing Ask.com. Showing a dominating 285,524 (64.2%) more searches than Ask.com.

Ask.com gained a little market share this month with 2.2%, which has grown from 1.7% last month. This number is not very reflective of their efforts, if you are Ask, you would at this point have to be looking to change your plan a bit. Ask's total searches for September were 158,969, up 22,116 (13.9%) from August. The curious thing here is that is only 15,456 (9.7%) more searches than July's report. YOY (year over year) Ask the report reflects a small increase of 4.5% for Ask, which is much better than the flat line growth of 0.0% from August.

My Web, Comcast, Bell South, and SBC Yellow pages are all showing little or no improvement in the market share over last month.

So, some surprises this month....Yahoo is not a healthy as we might have expected, and Ask.com continues to fail in their efforts to join the lead engines. Google leading the pack and continuing to show sustained growth in their market share is becoming a harder target for Yahoo to hit. Yahoo is really going to have to pour it on to gain any real ground here.

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"


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