Search Market Share

Google, Yahoo! & MSN fight it out

• When looking at the services and products offered by the 3 major search engines. Wikipedia offers up the most comprehensive lists. Google with the longest (+-145), then trailing behind Yahoo! (+-46), and MSN (+-40).

• These numbers alone indicate the value of the contributions made by each of the search engines to the search industry.

• Searchers often don’t understand the different relevancy criteria used by the different engines – each one runs by their own rules!

• Google’s scope has increased nicely over the last two years, whilst Yahoo! And MSN have gradually decreased.

• Over the last 23 months, Yahoo! & MSN have dropped by almost 3% in market share, whilst Google’s went up by over 6%

• Global Market Share Nov 2008: Google 81% - Yahoo! 10.5% - MSN 3%

2007 Search Market Overview

2008 Search Market Overview

Global market share changes

November 2008

December 2006

Google reigns supreme

• Google’s power over the market is obvious, they currently don’t have any competitor’s who are even close to having the same industry coverage as them.

• From day to day Google increases in strength and authority.

• Google’s finances have definitively put them in greater standings than their challengers, as Mihaela Lica stated “a few million dollars in the hands of brilliant people ultimately will not be able to topple a leviathan with billions behind equally brilliant minds.” This in conjunction with their highly effective advertising platform and their growing market share makes them just that much more dominant.

• Google’s secrecy also helps them get a step up in search. By not revealing too much about their methods Google make it hard to be dethroned as king of search.

• Emerging search providers approach it from different perspectives (semantic, social, community-based) and present their results in fresh forms (design, layout, structure) in the hope that they’ll appeal to the masses, more so than Google.

• But… it's clearly evident that search dominance is as much about branding, popularity, and financial backing as it is about relevance or looks.

Google still reigning supreme…

• After deeper scrutiny, the other engines reveal their inferiority to Google, despite the fact that all of Google's moves are monitored, analysed, and dissected by the public and the media on a regular basis (usually quite ignorantly).

• Google is a money making machine! They use money to make more money and are consistently making good investment choices to expand their domination across the web.

• Microsoft also have the financial backing but their choices aren’t as wise and the fact that their main focus is not on search also plays a big role in where they stand.

• Google is the No.1 brand in the world! And their bank account knows it… they rise way above other brands like GE, Coca Cola, IBM, McDonald’s, as well as Microsoft and Apple, in terms of brand value.

• Ultimately, forget ‘content is king’… GOOGLE IS KING!

• According to the BrandZ 2008 Report, Google’s brand value was stated as being $86.1billion, need I say more?

The value of MSN and Yahoo! traffic…

• Have been in the search game for many years

• They are better than MSN but nowhere nearly as good as Google at determining if a link is a natural citation or not.

• They have loads of internal content and a paid inclusion program, both of which give them incentive to bias the search results toward commercial results.

• Off-topic reciprocal links still work great in Yahoo! , which is not a good thing if you want your site to rank favourably due to the valuable links you have onsite!

• Are new to the search game• They are bad at determining if a link is

natural or artificial in nature.• Their link analysis is not up to scratch,

therefore they place too much weight on the page content.

• Their poor relevancy algorithms cause a heavy bias toward commercial results.

• They like short-lived recent links • New sites which are generally not trusted

in other engines can rank quickly here• Off-topic reciprocal links also still work

great in MSN Search.

The value of Google traffic…

• Google has been in the search game a long time, and saw the web graph when it was much cleaner than the current one, so they have a better overview of its contents.

• They are much better than the other engines at determining if a link is a true editorial reference or if it is an artificial link.

• They look out for natural link growth over time, not gaining 100 links all at once. • They give heavy preference to search results containing informational resources. • They prefer to trust old sites that have been around for a while.• Google has aggressive duplicate content filters that filter out many pages with similar

content. • On-page variation and link anchor text variation are important to Google. A page with a

single reference or a few references of a modifier will frequently outrank pages that are heavily focused on a search phrase containing that modifier.

• The crawl depth is determined not only by link quantity, but also link quality. Excessive low quality links may make your site less likely to be crawled deep or even included in the index.

• Off-topic reciprocal links are generally ineffective in Google, due to their lack of relevance and associated opportunity cost.

Where does Yahoo! & MSN’s future stand?

• A few years ago many web ‘gurus’ thought they knew what the future held and predicted that all 3 engines would be going head to head by now. Clearly they aren’t.

• MSN was tipped at being the obvious lead in the search race due to their billions of dollars of funding under Microsoft’s sweet bank balance. Clearly it didn’t.

• Way back when there was a prediction that Yahoo! would surpass Google in the search race because they had been around longer. Age wasn’t enough. In 2008 Yahoo! signed a deal with Google for them to power Yahoo!’s paid advertising. A step back?

• What do these unfulfilled predictions mean for Yahoo! & MSN’s future? That they need to go back to the drawing board in order to catch

up to the stature and mass coverage that Google has attained.

• Microsoft is famous for their IT inventions, and has never really been able to penetrate the search market sufficiently, and there is doubt they will anytime soon (see SM stats).

• Yahoo!’s name has been out there in search since 1994 but they have not gained the same kind of enthusiastic support that Google has gained since their launch in 1996.

Stock Prices compared

Google share value drops by over 60% in last year Yahoo share value drops almost 60% in last year

Stock Prices …continued

Microsoft shares have also dropped in the past year, by almost 45%

Summary:• Most of the annotations represent:

- new deals being signed off or terminated- new product launches- the weakening economic situation- soaring share prices- management changes- external statistics reporting- revenue results announcements- possible search mergers- product price cuts- entrance into a new market

• Google may have the best looking stock price in the end, however, they too have felt the burden of the weakening economic situation worldwide

• Due to Microsoft’s various avenues of income they have suffered the least in stock price devaluing

• With none of the competitors having shown any growth in share value over the last 12 months, it makes you wonder what the future holds for search investors

That’s all folks… Stay tuned for more SE Antics

A company’s culture often depicts the success of that company. The cultures of Google, Yahoo! & MSN are ironically illustrated in the following picture:

…Google uses sophisticated technology and spends the money to do things right, Yahoo has some clever ideas but they aren't quite up to speed on their technology, and MSN is still

ambling in the past.

By Kim Gordon