Google's search dominance continues to grow
Clocks up 3.8 billion searches in April
Posted in Management, 23rd May 2007 09:12 GMT
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Google accounted for 55 per cent of all search queries carried out in the US in the month of April, according to Nielsen/NetRatings data released Tuesday.
Nearly 3.8 billion Google searches were carried out in the period, a 42 per cent increase on last year's results.
Main rival Yahoo! Search came in a distant second with just under 1.5 billion searches carried out. Together, Google and Yahoo! accounted for over three quarters of all searches carried out in the US in April.
Meanwhile, Microsoft's MSN/Windows Live Search service came in a far-away third, with nine per cent of the market or 612 million searches, representing a drop in market share since March, the first such drop in the past several months. Microsoft executives indicated back in January that they were not satisfied with the performance of the company's search service.
In a bid to push its dominance of the online search market even further, Google announced earlier this month that it would be integrating all of its various search services so that a single search query will now generate results from a variety of previously separate sources such as videos, images, news stories, maps, books, and websites. The move looks set to drive more traffic to the Google News aggregation service and Google-owned YouTube, further reinforcing Google's status as an online media gatekeeper.
"The ultimate goal of universal search is to break down the silos of information that exist on the web and provide the very best answer every time a user enters a query," commented Google's vice president of search products and user experience Marissa Mayer at the time.
Google also recently revamped its personalised homepage service, now renamed iGoogle. The relaunch though was marred by the loss of some users' personal information such as contact lists and diary dates.
Copyright © 2007, ENN
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COMMENTS
Goodsearch
If you're in the US, use Goodsearch instead. Yeah, they use Yahoo, but you get money for your favorite charity. And if you don't have one, try Corgiaid :-)
Dillon, VP of Corgiaid, a 501(c)3
Little is good
Google may be going to far if they decide to give multiple search results for videos, images, webpages etc. all on the one page.
Currently the nice simple design and good search results is what keeps me and everyone else coming back - unlike Yahoo and MSN I am not inundated with crap I do not want to see. If I want an image I click the images tab and do a search from there, if i want a video I just type "video" next to my search query. If it's news I am after then the News tab does it... It's clean simple and nice.
I am hoping they don't go a step too far in their quest for dominance and spoil one of the aspects of Google which keeps people coming back, they may have complex algorithms working for us behind the scenes but its the simplicity of it all that everyone likes.
More searches because more useless results?
Maybe the number of searches has increased because people are having to do more searches to get the results they need?
You're trying to find out why your laptop has a problem, so you type in the model number, and all you get are those "deals" websites. So you refine your search and again, the top 200 results are sales sites, some from the other side of the world. Completely and utterly useless. So you revise the search again, and again, and again... until you get lucky and the query appears verbatim on some website which is all you really wanted in the first place. But instead you had to do a half dozen searches. I don't remember it being as bad a few years ago, good results were easier to find.
No, they're all terrible
Google just happens to be the best of a bad bunch. But Microsofts search technology is terrible... my tip for finding stuff on their knowledgebase is to seach for the most unrelated thing to your problem you can think of... Its the best chance to find what you want.
thats cause all the rest suck
Microsoft have not got a chance, I even use google to search their MSDN site, instead of Live.
Yahoo never returns anything of use and I think a lot of the time they sneak in an Advert in the results.
Ask.com, do they even have a search algorythm or is it just microsoft indexing ?
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