Google US Search Market Share: 65% or 56%?

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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On Tuesday when we noted the HitWise search market share figures, we noted how many search measuring metrics differ from source to source.  Some news out of Nielsen/NetRatings from yesterday shows what a stark difference there can be.  It isn’t that one source is right or wrong per se, but the methodologies and the sampling pool of users are different from source to source. 

Google (GOOG-NASDAQ) search took an estimated 4 Billion searches for 56.3% of the U.S. search market, followed by Yahoo!’s (YHOO-NASDAQ) 1.54 Billion searched 21.5% of the U.S. search market.  Microsoft’s (MSFT-NASDAQ) MSN/Live had 605 million searches for an 8.4% stake, Time Warner’s (TWX-NYSE) AOL had 381.9 million searches for a 5.3% market share, and IAC/Interactive’s (IACI-NASDAQ) Ask.com had 142.4 million searches for a 2% market share.

This particular survey showed Ask.com with the only drop in its market share year over year, but the calculations for the gains elsewhere seems different than before.  You can compare this Nielsen/NetRatings data to that of Hitwise from Tuesday and you’ll see why we warned ahead of time how different search results and metrics are from source to source.

Jon C. Ogg
June 21, 2007

Jon Ogg can be reached at [email protected]; he does not own securities in any of the companies he covers.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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