San Francisco — According to recent statistics collected by Nielsen Online indicates that Google’s dominance of the U.S. search market share increased as its growth surpassed that of the overall market. The overall search market grew 16.7% to 9.5 billion searches over the previous year. Google now holds an estimated 64.2% of the “search share market.”
Nevertheless, a great number of search users use multiple search engines, thus this indicates that NOT all of the 64.2% of users ONLY search Google. According to Nielsen, Google’s share represents 6.1 billion searches, which is roughly four times greater, or 400% more, than Yahoo Search, which has a 15.8% share of the search market with an estimated 1.5 billion searches, an estimated growth of 1.7% over the past year.
Microsoft however has scarcely witnessed any growth in search share over the previous year, with only a 0.3% growth over the previous year and a 10.3% hold of the search market.
Another interesting important statistics is that AOL Search has witnessed more growth than Microsoft or Yahoo, with a 6.6% growth after last year. AOL has been quite aggressive in the establishment of their content network and bringing together all of the search and advertising acquisitions it has made over the past couple of years.
Here are the full year-over-year (YOY) growth statistics from Nielsen:
AOL has recently made several moves which indicates that the company is getting very serious about search, including its recently appointed Google Senior VP of Advertising Tim Armstrong away from Google to become their new CEO.
However, many companies have been bundling up their arsenals, and cutting back on wasteful spending, begin to forge partnerships and ventures which may one day position them to go head to head against Google.