RSSMicrosoft, Yahoo continue to bleed search share
By Ed Oswald | Published November 21, 2007, 4:33 PM
While both companies showed growth in search queries, in the all-important matter of search share, both lost as much as Google gained during the month of October.
Google's search share climbed to 58.5 percent, up 1.5 percent from September. Conversely, Yahoo and Microsoft's share fell to 22.9 and 9.7 percent, down 0.8 and 0.6 percent respectively.
Rounding out the top five was the Ask Network, which showed no change month-to-month at 4.7 percent, and AOL search, which fell 0.1 percent to 4.2 percent.
Microsoft's drop below 10 percent market share continues a slide of just about 3 percent from July of this year. It also shows that the company's efforts to promote its Live Search product are largely falling on deaf ears.
comScore rates search share by taking the top five search engines and counting the queries between them. Among these, 10.5 billion searches were conducted during the month, a 12 percent increase over September.
Google lead all with a 14.8 percent increase in search queries, followed by a 10.7 percent increase by Ask. AOL's queries increased by 9.4 percent, while Yahoo's increased by 8 percent. Microsoft was last, posting a 5.6 percent increase.
As much as I hate to admit it, lately Live.com has been giving me the best results for general searches. (Google is still better for results for specific things like error codes)
I also think that live.com's interface is WAY nicer than the competitors. I'm not sure why more people dont use it. But most non-techie people I know, don't even really know it exists. I think Microsoft should do some direct LIve.com name marketing on the mainstream media like TV.
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|I tend to use Yahoo as much as possible. I don't like the way Google tracks all of my searches for marketing.
I have website, that is basically dead now, which used to get a few hits. Since I declined the offer for Adsense, I can't do a google search for my site using a direct quote from the heading. I am not saying that Google favors sites with adsense but it is a curios thing.
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|I've tried all major search engines and was only satisfied with Google. Now wonder!
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|When you think about google's momentum, their stock price, media attention and word of mouth advertising they really don't have to do much to maintain it. Unlike Microsft and ask.com who have huge marketing campaigns.
In my opinion ask.com has a much prettier and more inovative features and look than google does. Often times if google is having trouble spitting out the search result im looking for I will try ask.com, thanks to their alternative search phrases I usually find what I want.
Also with images on the right side, the quick view binoculars its really very neat.
If google adopts an updated interface and newer more innovative search tools like that, I really don't see anything stopping them. But then again they are already doing so well not really much of a reason to change it I guess.
One thing though that google does have that is very nice is the calculator and conversion results within the search, no one else has that and is one reason I always come back. Well that and the fact gmail, calender, picasa and google documents is there too. Also gotta love igoogle. It's basically a one stop shop.
Microsoft has quite literally copied every feature google has, from the layout to the way search results are displayed. Take away the color scheme and live.com and it's google. At least ask.com is being innovative.
google is no different then cleanex, bandaid or coke. That is exactly where you want to be.
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|The results of live or yahoo differ enough in my tests that they aren't worth trying again.
Example: Searching for technical data typically shows me that google has search locked up. I can find more technical data (error messages, event id, etc) on Google than I can on Microsoft, and Microsoft runs the OS I'm looking for! Google also has far less clutter in its results and homepages. Page design is very important to me. Hence Yahoo loses out every time.
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|google is no different then cleanex
You mean Kleenex, I assume.
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|search.yahoo.com
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