Here’s another set of statistics recently released by the Internet research firm Compete that certainly does not jive with the breaking claim delivered today by Yahoo! of it’s greater-than-$44.6bn self-evaluation. Market share numbers for the top five search engines on the Web (we presume these numbers adhere to US-only traffic) for January 2007, December 2007, and January 2008 are as follows:
As you can see, Google gained half a percent in market share in the first 31 days following the close of 2007. While it stood at a monstrous 68.1% to Yahoo!’s 17.0% and Microsoft’s 9.1%, it continued upward into the new year. It now lays claim to 68.6% market share.
But, as you well know, Google is not the most prominent color in the pack there at the moment. Yahoo! and Microsoft are both naturally sitting in their respective #2 and #3 spots more conspicuously than ever before, what with the big public hubbub (poor choice of words, eh?) over the proposed merger of the two that has dominated news feeds far and wide. And curiously (and unsurprisingly), the two have each lost a bit of steam with time.
Yahoo!’s share diminished 0.3% since the last hours of ’07, and if one looks back to the start of that year, the company shows to have fallen some 6%. A significant change, for sure.
Microsoft’s claim on the market has remained largely complacent. In January 2007, the company saw itself commanding an 8.9% slice, which grew to 9.1% later in the year, only to fall 0.4% over the first few weeks of 2008.