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What is Google's real market share in the US?

gabrielweinberg.com

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Re: What is Google's real market share in the US?

#21

Post by jmilloy »

w1ntermute wrote: post #8
lacker wrote: post #7

I used to work on search quality at Google, but I think I can answer this just using public information. ;-) I think the answer is that Yahoo and Bing have a much higher rate of navigational queries - queries like [facebook] or [twitter.com] that are just the name of a site. This class of queries does indeed send a much higher proportion of their traffic to a small number of sites. The available public statistics see…

> I think the answer is that Yahoo and Bing have a much higher rate of navigational queries - queries like [facebook] or [twitter.com] that are just the name of a site. This class of queries does indeed send a much higher proportion of their traffic to a small number of sites. > This makes sense if you think about it. The sort of person that searches on non-Google search engines is very different than the sort of per…

Then, for these users you describe, it could be that every google search is preceded by a bing search (from the browser search bar, for "google").

Re: What is Google's real market share in the US?

#22

Post by earl »

Traffic sources for the last calendar month as measured by GA: [google, yahoo, bing]

my blog about R, bash, and whatever crosses my mind: http://blog.earlh.com : [1.4k, 9, 9]

my gf's blog about her life and our dog: http://danceswithcorgis.com : [877, 37, 14]

edit: see also acangiano's blogs: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2881340

Re: What is Google's real market share in the US?

#23

Post by roryleg »

lacker wrote: post #7

I used to work on search quality at Google, but I think I can answer this just using public information. ;-) I think the answer is that Yahoo and Bing have a much higher rate of navigational queries - queries like [facebook] or [twitter.com] that are just the name of a site. This class of queries does indeed send a much higher proportion of their traffic to a small number of sites. The available public statistics see…

This is an excellent point, but I think you mean that when taking non-1 words into account it would show that Google is about 1.5X underrepresented. If indeed that is the case, then the true "search/discovery" market share is about 90%, as supported through other commenters' site data.

Also compelling is the data AJ007 presents on number of days/month used. Bing at 8.9 trailing Google(21.5) and Yahoo (18) significantly. To me this clearly suggests that Bing users are the relatively unsavvy searcher of the Bing/Yahoo bunch. Does anyone have any recent demo data on the search engines? My guess is that Bing has a relatively older mix.

Re: What is Google's real market share in the US?

#24

Post by ashishgandhi »

jellicle wrote: post #19
seanalltogether wrote: post #2

Not many people realize this, but wikipedia makes all their stat information public. http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOrigi... As a top 10 site with a pretty broad appeal I'd say they are one of the best gauges of internet users. Google represents at least 90% of search engine references coming in to that site.

This is basically a measure of which search engine promotes Wikipedia links more heavily in their algorithm, not a measure of the search engine's market share....

If I'm looking for an article on something and Google thinks Wikipedia is one of the solutions it displays it amongst OTHER results. I click on it because I tend to like their articles.

I say the stat is what the stat it says it is. Wikipedia visitors tend to use Google more than other search engines to get there. I personally Google something with "wiki" thrown in as a keyword at the end so I can get to the correct Wikipedia article.

Re: What is Google's real market share in the US?

#25

Post by vaksel »

as far as anyone is concerned Google does indeed have a monopoly on search...Bing spent something like 150 million to bump their share by a few percentage points

And it's not like Google's product is that much better than Bing...the difference is really miniscule...but that's the problem...Google is good enough so to beat them you really need to bring something truly revolutionary to the table

Re: What is Google's real market share in the US?

#26

Post by kenjackson »

IMO, there is little question that Google's search numbers are higher. This is one reason why I think US antitrust probes are more justified given some of their actions (not saying they've done anything wrong necessarily, but prudence is advised).

This also explains why MS search revenue is lower than expected. People don't click ads in navigational searches.

Re: What is Google's real market share in the US?

#27

Post by bauchidgw »

well on most SEO conferences there is the agreement that a good search optimized site gets at least 90 % from its search traffic via google in the us market.

in other western markets (i.e. germany) google has a market share of 98% plus and we are fine with it.

said that, one of my sites only gets 28% of its search traffic in the us market via google, but it has a penalty on most of its pages (everything but the startpage and its blog is banned from google and with good reason) so its an outlier.

Re: What is Google's real market share in the US?

#28

Post by minikomi »

Would like to see the equivalent of Japan ... Yahoo.jp has a ridiculous market share here (especially amongst the pre-smartphone market - which is huge).

Edit: best I could find was from 2009 which puts yahoo at 51% over google at 39%[1]. However, google seems to be partnering with yahoojp to help them improve their search technology[2].

[1]http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2009/3/J...

[2]http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201012020342.html

Re: What is Google's real market share in the US?

#30

Post by jessriedel »

epi0Bauqu wrote: post #9
jessriedel wrote: post #6

> That seems high indeed, but everyone I talk to "in the wild" who runs high traffic sites actually sees a much higher percentage of their search engine traffic coming from Google, usually from 80-90%. Wouldn't the people that Gabriel Weinberg talks to be people who run websites much more likely to be frequented by the highly tech literate? Seems like a fantastically biased data set.

Nope, the people I was referring to for the most part run sites targeted at the general public not techies.

I have no idea who you talk to, but I'll say this: just because you target your website at the general public doesn't mean that your user bases isn't significantly slanted toward techies. It's not just the subject of a website that can bias is like this; it can just be their size, or their newness.
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