Web In Depth

Well the stats are out on the major search engines, as the year comes to an end. Danny at SearchEngineLand has compared data from 4 major companies; Nielsen, ComScore, Hitwise and Compete.

Nielsen came up with folllowing figures, based on percentage of all US serchers.

• Google: 57.7%
• Yahoo: 17.9%
• Microsoft: 12.0%
• AOL: 4.5%
• Ask: 2.7%

Comscore gave percentage of all searches handled by the search engines.

• Google: 58.6%
• Yahoo: 22.4%
• Microsoft: 9.8%
• Ask: 4.6%
• AOL: 4.5%

Hitwise gave percentage of all searches handled by the search engines in November

• Google: 65.1%
• Yahoo: 21.2%
• Microsoft: 7.1%
• Ask: 4.6%

Compete gave percentage of all searches handled by the search engines in November

• Google: 68.9%
• Yahoo: 17.4%
• Microsoft: 9.2%
• Ask: 3.9%

What does this tell us? The usual sory of course that google is dominating with yahoo and Microsoft trailing behind. But we can see some disparity in the values in Hitwise Compete on one side and Nielsen, ComScore on the other. This is mainly attributed to the return of the school goers who are more biased towards using Google, thus this increased values for November only searches.

What is more interesting to any one keeping up with this type of stats is the trends over the past year as that will give an indication as to popularity of search engines. Again the stats have been provided and Danny has sumarised them. I wan’t go into deatil on what each survey revels but overall everybody agrees that google has gained ground while yahoo and microsoft seems to have declined , although some say they have stayed steady.