According to Hitwise, Google attracted 60.29% of the total U.S. search volume for the four weeks ending September 9th, 2006. This sets a new high for the year, jumping slightly above the previous high of 60.23% reached for the four weeks ending July 29th, 2006.
Yahoo was second with 22.58% of the search volume in the U.S. while MSN was third with 11.56%. Ask was fourth with 3.63% of total U.S. search volume.
Of the four search engines in the report, Google and Ask increased their shares of the search volume in the U.S. for the four weeks ending on September 9th, while Yahoo and MSN’s shares dipped.
Google’s share increased 0.30% from 59.99% for the four weeks ending August 26th, 2006, while Ask’s share 0.26% from 3.37% for the same four weeks in August.
Sixty percent has become a virtual benchmark for Google’s search share, fostering questions of whether Google has plateaued or not.
Despite dominating the search market, Google has yet to topple Yahoo in terms of being a portal leader. Hitwise recently released data showing the top 25 popular Websites for August 2006, showing Yahoo Mail and Yahoo.com to be the second and third most popular respectively, while Google was number four.
Yahoo had five total sites in the top 25 list, accounting for 11.03% of the market, while Google had three sites accounting for 4.57% of the market.
Sources:
http://publications.mediapost.com/index.
cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticle&art_
aid=48203&art_type=14
http://weblogs.hitwise.com/bill-tancer/
2006/09/latest_search_numbers_google_c.html
http://www.hitwise.com/datacenter/rankings.php
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