Nielsen//NetRatings has issued the findings of their December 2006 search share rankings, which shows increases in year-on-year growth rates for every major search engine in the US market except for MSN / Windows Live Search:
Provider (000) Growth Searches
Google Search 3,035,617 22.6% 50.8%
Yahoo! Search 1,412,904 30.1% 23.6%
MSN/Windows Live Search 499,946 -9.7% 8.4%
AOL Search 362,140 7.8% 6.1%
My Way Search 141,527 4.7% 2.4%
Ask.com Search 128,452 17.2% 2.1%
EarthLink Search 31,930 17.6% 0.5%
Dogpile.com Search 30,487 2.1% 0.5%
Comcast Search 26,931 N/A 0.5%
NexTag Search 26,835 123.2% 0.4%
The amazing part of these numbers is that the Windows Operating System corners the PC market, the Internet Explorer browser enjoys a 59% market share, and Microsoft has become the darling of the press with their Vista rollout, but they are still losing share of the search engine market.
One has to wonder if the adoption of Vista by the PC market and Vista’s ‘always on’ web integrated document and file searching capabilities will help Microsoft reclaim part of the search market, or if Microsoft users will continue to switch over to Google and Yahoo powered search tools.
The amazing thing about these numbers is that no one is pointing out the obvious flaws in the comparisons being made.
Microsoft has successfully branded a new search service (live.com) in less than a year, to the point where that new search service received approximately 2/3 of the traffic that Google did in December.
Simply comparing the number of queries made doesn’t tell you anything useful, although it strongly implies that people find what they are looking for on Yahoo! and Live in about one quarter of the time it takes them to find whatever they want on Google.
Why is that?
You have 100 million people searching on Yahoo!, 100 million people search on Google, and 70 million people searching on Live.
Google’s market share — in terms of users served — is not nearly as large as these reports make it out to be.
I use Google and think it is the best search machine in the world. Yahoo made only for American people wich have money. I know thet Google too take money :O)
Obvious flaws? Such as assuming that it must take 4 times longer to do a search — because you can do 4 times as many searches within the same time period? If anything, the fact that more searches are done on Google within a given time period indicates that Yahoo and MSN are much slower. This can be corroborated by the load times of the pages. All the portal fluff on Yahoo and MSN slow them down. MSN uses 14x as much bandwidth as Google. (218242 bytes vs 15656 bytes – 31 HTTP requests vs 6) But that’s not really why they have lower market share.
Yahoo is #1 in traffic — but 49% of that goes to mail.yahoo.com. Only 11% goes to Yahoo search.
MSN is #2 in traffic — but 84% of that is to hotmail, search gets a minuscule 2%.
Google is #3 in traffic — and only 10% of that goes to gmail. 67% goes to search.
(traffic details from Alexa)
One way to win the search engine competition — don’t distract your traffic.
Somewhere there may be a free e-mail site with a similar article in which MSN looks like the winner. But they’re still losing in search.
“If anything, the fact that more searches are done on Google within a given time period indicates that Yahoo and MSN are much slower.”
It’s this kind of flawed logic that holds so many people back in the search marketing industry.
I don’t have slow load times on Yahoo! and MSN.
“traffic details from Alexa”
There’s a universally reliable source of information for you.
This is why so many people in the search marketing community struggle.
MSN from a paid search perspective is lacking in 3 cheif respects:
1) adCenter as a platform sends chills down the spine of a PPC marketer. One touch of the “back” button and you’re thrown from your session. AdWords and Overture allows for free navigability.
2)Reports are a terror to create. They don’t exactly freely distribute API keys for large campaigns & each campaign has different internal tracking codes.
3) They simply don’t monetize traffic. 1 click of 500 impressions for a popular financial services term that they made $5 from. This was in avg pos of 1.6. They missed at least 50 bucks there.
However despite minimal traffic, a clumsy interface and questionable ad placement, the conversion rates aren’t bad (though it’s not scalable unfortunately.)
Additionally, though I forgot to make note of it in my prior post; MSN habitually forces editorial changes to relevant keywords that I’ve found to perform well across AdWords & Yahoo SM.
A saving grace for adCenter would be their own version of AdWords editor which ideally would convert a Google CSV into their own format. At the very least it’d increase an SEM’s willingness to push adCente as a viable paid search engine.