New data from Hitwise showed that Google is still leading the major search engine pack gaining 2% increase in July’s share of US searches from previous month. Comparing the current data with that of last year, Google has posted a 10% in share of US searches in the same month last year. Overall Google has accounted for 70.77% share of all the searches conducted by Americans in July.
Trailing Google is of course Yahoo! Search with 18.65% share, MSN Live Search with 5.36% and Ask.com with 3.53% share of the search market last month.
The Hitwise report also highlighted the growing share of visits to Google’s site. Site traffic for Google has consistently increased since the last 13 months. Google posted a 25% increase in market share of visits from the same month last year.
Interestingly, the report also pointed out that Google has been consistently getting significant number of returning visitors. The rate has been increasing steadily every month starting in October of 200. And this is one issue that Google has been trying to work out.
It looks like Microsoft and other critics may be right after all, since basing on the July data provided by Hitwise, combining Yahoo!Search and Google Search would account for around 80.8% of the US search market.
This doesn’t at all surprise me. In fact, I only see Google’s proportion of the search market growing.
The real question, I think, might be how will Congress get them first: through anti-trust violations, or by messing with their ability to behaviorally target users with their ads: http://gypsybandito.com/the-real-google-killer/
The data is bogus, as it doesn’t take into consideration the number of visitors to each search site (Google has less than 40% share of actual visits) or the fact that a lot of rank-checking slams Google every month.