Google Giant Keeps On Growing

Google held on to the top place yet again in the US monthly search engine league, increasing its market share further in April.

According to comScore Networks’ qSearch analysis for last month, 43.1% of all American searches were performed on Google’s sites. The search engine, which is so dominant that it has even spawned a new verb “to google”, has taken the top spot every month since August last year.

Searches by information-hungry Americans numbered 6.6 billion in April, with Google scooping 2.9 billion of them. Runner-up Yahoo! had a billion fewer searches than Google, netting just 28% of the total, down from 30.7% in the same period last year. Third-placed MSN garnered just 858 million searches or 12.9%, a drop of 3.2% since April 2005. Comparative small-fry Ask.com lost 0.2%, dropping to 5.9% (384 million searches), despite a big marketing campaign.

The gap between Google and its competitors continues to widen despite recent revamps by Yahoo! and MSN in the battle to tempt searchers away from the top performer (see Yahoo! Seeks Search Dominance With Revamped Site). Only in toolbar searches was one rival close to the leader, with Google capturing 48% of toolbar searches and Yahoo! 47.6 %, a total of over 95% of market share between them.

Here in the UK, Google is also leading the way. Research published earlier this year analysing the number of click-throughs showed Google with 64% compared to Yahoo’s 10%, AOL’s 9% and MSN’s 7%.

Google even came top in a recent survey of best-loved brands, with UK consumers taking the US upstart to their hearts above British brands (see We All Go Ga-Ga Over Google).

Google: 020 7031 3000 www.google.co.uk/