2005 Search Engine Market Share
Annual market share gains by the big 3 in the Search Engine Wars
Searches made via search engines in the U.S. topped 5 billion in December and the share of search by Google continues to grow according to research released this week by Nielsen//NetRatings.
Nielsen mentioned that just over 5 billion online searches were conducted across approximately 60 search engines in the U.S. in Dec. compared to 3.3 billion in Dec. 2004 - a 55 % year-over-year increase.
The big-three search engines: Google, Yahoo! and MSN performed 81.1% of all searches in December 2005, up slightly from 78.8% in December 2004.
In absolute terms, all of the big three experienced double-digit growth year-over-year in December 2005, however in terms of market share Google was the big winner.
Google Search grew 75 % to nearly 2.5 billion searches.
Yahoo! Search rose 53 % to nearly 1.1 billion searches.
MSN Search increased 20 % to 553 million searches
Google has pulled significantly away from its competitors. The market leader in online search posted a 48.8% share in December 2005 up from a 43.1% share in December 2004. Yahoo! place second with a 21.4% market share down from 21.7% the previous year while MSN dropped to 10.9% down from 14.0% the previous year.
Despite more searches, Nielsen-NetRatings found that the number of people connecting to the Internet in the U.S. rose just three percent to 207 million people. This meant that the average online American performed approximately 25 searches in December 2005 versus about 16 searches in December 2004.