Google Still Chipping Away At Microsoft
Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007;
-- Paul Bennett |
If rumors weren’t abundant enough, they sure will be in the coming weeks. According to the latest published figures by online competitive intelligence service, Hitwise, Microsoft have lost 3 percent year on year [directly to Google] in US Search Market Share.
Percentage of US Searches Among Leading Search Engine Providers Domain Jul-07 Jun-07 Jul-06 www.google.com 64.35% 63.92% 60.23% search.yahoo.com 22.13% 21.31% 22.54% search.msn.com / live.com 8.79% 9.85% 11.77% www.ask.com 3.21% 3.42% 3.29%
Surely the only way that Microsoft can hope to compete with Google is through major acquisition - making Yahoo! (who have held steady) an even tastier proposition. But let’s speculate for a moment on these giants combining search efforts; their joint market share would still be half that of Google’s - unless of course, they were to undertake a considerable rethink in the process.
Satya Nadella, Corporate Vice President and the man leading Microsoft’s engineering efforts across Web Search, has denied rumors that his team are working on a replacement search engine - but hasn’t ruled out the idea of “reconceptualising” the search user interface to gain users.
In a recent interview, Nadella outlined three areas where Microsoft can innovate in search:
- Core - improving search relevance (mmm… could do more)
- User Experience - how to get searchers to use them more (mmm… scratch head)
- Integration - into existing Microsoft properties (mmm… reputation not great)
Matt Tatham of Hitwise also reported that Google is an increasing source of traffic to key industries:
Search engines continue to be the primary way Internet users navigate to key industry categories. Comparing July 2007 to July 2006, the Travel, News and Media, Entertainment and Business and Finance categories received double digit increases in their share of traffic coming directly from search engines.
Clearly Microsoft still remain a huge competitive threat to Google - their power supersedes that - but whilst Search continues to reach out to more people, across new platforms, Microsoft have got to either strike now or differentiate themselves in a stroke of genius.
Source: Hitwise - All figures are based on US data from the Hitwise sample of 10 million Internet users.
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August 22nd, 2007 at 9:04 am
[...] (Source) If rumors weren’t abundant enough, they sure will be in the coming weeks. According to the latest published figures by online competitive intelligence service, Hitwise, Microsoft have lost 3 percent year on year [directly to Google] in US Search Market Share. [...]
August 22nd, 2007 at 5:30 pm
“Microsoft have lost 3 percent year on year [directly to Google] in US Search Market Share.”
Not surprising. On occasion I go over to their serps to see what kind of information they might be displaying for a given term, and every single time I find sites that are not of the same quality as displayed in google or yahoo.
I get the feeling nothing has really changed in the last 5 years over their.
August 23rd, 2007 at 9:26 am
Your only helping to fuel the rumors - but I hope they do buy Yahoo.
August 23rd, 2007 at 11:14 pm
I note from my latest stats, that Google is responsible for 100% of the enquiries to my site. This clearly demonstrates that other search engines have no impact at all as far as my band and musicians business in Sydney Australia is concerned
August 24th, 2007 at 5:08 am
Microsoft indeed has to do someting with msn search/live.com, as it’s obviously far behind the big two.
August 24th, 2007 at 5:52 pm
I wonder if Peter Rappolt is concerned about his complete dependence upon a single search engine for traffic that, I assume, he values highly. A slight hiccup in the algorithm and his traffic could be ravished.
August 27th, 2007 at 12:04 pm
goods
August 28th, 2007 at 10:35 am
All statistics show at lease 10 times more requests to Google than to Yahoo and Live
September 4th, 2007 at 4:21 pm
[...] How Microsoft Can Get Better At Search - Paul Bennett analyzes the July U.S. Search Market Share data report from Hitwise, focusing on some steps Microsoft can take to beef up its search offering, as the company gave up 3% of market share year-over-year — directly to Google. Bennett discusses how an oft-rumored merger between Microsoft and Yahoo would have to be structured to make any impact on Google’s search domination (as the two combined would still only have half of Google’s market share), as well as what Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s corporate vice president, has said about “reconceptualizing” the MSN search interface to gain users. [...]
September 18th, 2007 at 11:17 am
I wonder the world stats as Yahoo! is not this popular worldwide. I know there are some European countries in which Google is preffered by like 95+% people. So Google’s G is becoming bigger every day.
November 18th, 2007 at 5:08 am
google always number one searh engine
July 15th, 2008 at 5:44 am
very nice topic thnx