New York— Search engine goliath Google continues to hold its supremacy above all other competitors in the search race, while searches at rival Microsoft’s Windows Live Search site has in fact dropped over the past year despite luring people with cash to use its services, according to the latest figures released on Monday by Nielsen Online.
According to reports released by Nielsen Online, top search providers in November of 2008 is the unrivalled Google that commanded about 64.1 percent of all searches conducted on the Web in the U.S., concluded Nielsen, up more than six percentage points compared to the 57.7 percent share position Google held one year earlier.
Google’s searches climbed 21.7 percent to 64.1 percent, and Yahoo’s searches dropped 1.4 percent from November 2007 to 16.1 percent share.
Interestingly, Google conducted more than 900,000 additional search queries during the month of November than the previous year (4.3 million in November ’07 versus 5.2 million in November ’08).
Meanwhile, searches carried out at Microsoft’s Windows Live Search dropped to 16.7 percent year-over-year, and as a result its market share in the U.S. in November fell from 12 percent to 9.1 percent, per Nielsen.
This decrease in usage is worth mentioning as it happened during the beginning of the holiday shopping season, when Microsoft’s shopping-friendly search product would seemingly harbor an advantage. Even the software giants’ cashback scheme from Live Search product that it rolled out in May of 2008 could not hold back the consumers to its site.
Overall searches carried out for the month reached beyond 8 billion, up 9.6 percent from a year earlier. The list below displays top 10 search providers in the U.S. for November 2008:
Top 10 search providers for November 2008, ranked by searches (U.S.) — (Credit: Nielsen Online)