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In a PC World article, Google has increased its market share, up to 63% from 61.9%. Yahoo and Microsoft both experienced drops from July.
The article states that "[t]he slipping market share of Yahoo and Microsoft doesn't speak well for their efforts to invigorate their online services and brands."
So is all hope lost? Not necessarily. One forum member writes that it's likely to see additional decreases in market share until Yahoo or Microsoft "make some major improvements to their sites or their search results." He suggests that they "make some new partnerships or buy out other companies as MSN has started doing."
Some also feel that Google's foray into the browser market may have contributed to the figures from last month.
Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.
Comments:
Michael1000
09/22/2008 08:56 pm
What's most interesting is that <a href="http://siteanalytics.compete.com/google.com/?metric=uv" target="_blank">Compete</a>, <a href="http://www.quantcast.com/google.com" target="_blank">Quantcast</a>, and <a href="http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/google.com" target="_blank">Alexa</a> all show that Google has been losing traffic for several months. And yet we continue to see these bogus "search market share" reports coming from comScore, Compete, Hitwise, and Nielsen -- all claiming that Google is growing its share. People in the SEO community need to understand that number of queries performed is an extremely unreliable metric because none of these services are filtering out the ranking checks and informational queries that people perform on Google. It's important to emphasize the unreliability of these market share metrics when discussing them. Hopefully, the metrics services will take note and do something to improve the quality of the information they are reporting.