Google Still Most Popular Search Engine Despite Gains by MSN & Yahoo
Yahoo and MSN have strived to come into their own over the past year with Yahoo Search growing at a spectacular rate and MSN blossoming into its own independent MSN Search. However, Google is still Google and the Godfather of Search is still the top used search engine in the United States.
Hitwise, the online intelligence company, reports that Google, Yahoo Search and MSN Search accounted for 93.5% of U.S. Internet searches across major engines in July 2005. Google’s share was 59.2 percent of searches, which was a 14% increase in share over last year.Yahoo! Search chimed in at 28.8% and MSN Search resulted in 5.5% of major search engine usage.
From the release : Google’s growth is noteworthy considering that, unlike its competitors, it does not have a stand-alone portal to drive traffic to the service. Yahoo! Search received 73 percent of its visits directly from its main portal sites (www.yahoo.com and my.yahoo.com) in July 2005, while MSN Search received 61 percent of its visits from its portal sites (www.msn.com, my.msn.com and dellnet.msn.com).
“Google continues to demonstrate the value of effective Internet search on its own, irrespective of any connection to a general Internet portal,” said Bill Tancer, General Manager, Worldwide Research, Hitwise. “Clearly the next big challenge for Google will be the arrival of Microsoft’s new operating system, “Vista,” which is said to have far tighter search integration.”
