Top 10 US Search Providers - October 2007

It's that time again.... Nielsen Netratings has released the top 10 US search providers for October, 2007. We have been posting these market data releases since the April, 2007 report. In the left hand menu you can click "US Search Market Data", and view all of our past market share posts.

There are some interesting developments in October's market share report. Honestly speaking, I lost a bet as well! Another SEO and I disagreed about Yahoo Search and it's ability to reclaim it's once strong brand loyalty. So, what about Yahoo? I suspected that they would begin to initialize the road to regaining their "claim to fame". Let's face it, Yahoo is also a household word. The data for October certainly doesn't speak to their recent efforts. Yahoo Search lost .7% of US searches month over month from their 19.5% September, 2007 market share. I realize .7% doesn't seem like a great deal, but it really reflects a great deal of actual searches for October.

The top 10 search providers make up 97.3% (7,713,994 searches) of all US searches for October. That's not much room for any search provider who didn't make the "A list". The top 3 are Google 55.5% (4,400,561 searches), Yahoo 18.8% (1,490,129 searches), and MSN/Live 13.8% (1,093,696 searches) make up 88.1% (6,984,386 searches) of the search pie for October!

So the next time someone tells you not to optimize for these engines, you can probably guess this person doesn't know their SEO. Clearly, your optimization efforts should be prioritized for the wealth of searches Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Live can provide. There are, of course additional factors. For example, search engines tend to attract a certain kind of crowd. MSN/Live tends to attract the "tech and gadget" crowd, while Yahoo is traditionally the home of monster commerce. While they are only going to provide the traffic inherent to their search volume, the search volume for your theme keyword phrases will generally be greater as well. Investigating your potential per a search engine's general audience, and targeting your SEO is quite effective.

Google continues on it's quest to overthrow the entire search world, with another steady increase in their market share. Google is looking like this for their trend: April-55.2%, May-56.3%, June-52.7%, July-53.3%, August-53.6%, September-54.0%, and October-55.5%. If you're working hard on your SEO, then you clearly have to be thinking like a "Googler" with your optimization strategy. No one wants to be left out of their share of 4,400,561 monthly searches!

MSN/Live is making some progress in their plight to become a notable searching platform again. In September MSN/Live captured 890,685 searches for 12.0% of the market share. In October, they have increased that "take" to 1,093,696 searches and weighs in at 13.8% of the market. That's a force to be reckoned with at 1.8% month over month growth!

I continue to be disappointed with Ask.com. From a marketing perspective, they should be really growing their market share more.... But the "proofs in the pudding", they are not seeing the return on investment for their creative marketing efforts. Last month Ask.com showed up with 2.2% of the market share, and this month 2.9%. September and October, showing the first real growth since May. Up until last month they were riding a roller coaster of very negligible ups and downs. I think Ask.com is going to have to try some more traditional methods if they plan to grow. No matter which engine users are searching with, they (in my opinion) want some things to be relatively standardized. Searchers are outside of their comfort zone in Ask's current interface, and webmasters are seriously disappointed overall with their indexing and caching performance.

The largest drop, from AOL, comes at the hands of their decision not to promote their brand any longer. AOL lost 2.3% of their market share in October with respect to September's 6.0% share. SEO Food: re-branding hurts!

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough


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