7 ms·

What is Google's real market share in the US?

87 points by pardo 15y ago

vaksel 15y ago
as far as anyone is concerned Google does indeed have a monopoly on search...Bing spent something like 150 million to bump their share by a few percentage points And it's not like Google's product is that much better than Bing...the difference is really miniscule...but that's the problem...Google is good enough so to beat them you really need to bring something truly revolutionary to the table
seanalltogether 15y ago
Not many people realize this, but wikipedia makes all their stat information public. http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOrigins.htm http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOrigi... As a top 10 site with a pretty broad appeal I'd say they are one of the best gauges of internet users. Google represents at least 90% of search engine references coming in to that site.
- epi0Bauqu 15y ago
  Is that a global number or just the US? If global, is it possible to segment to US?
  - seanalltogether 15y ago
    I believe it's global, but if someone wanted to do the legwork to determine US only, all the log files are uploaded on an hourly basis here http://dammit.lt/wikistats/ http://dammit.lt/wikistats/
- jellicle 15y ago
  This is basically a measure of which search engine promotes Wikipedia links more heavily in their algorithm, not a measure of the search engine's market share....
  - ashishgandhi 15y ago
    If I'm looking for an article on something and Google thinks Wikipedia is one of the solutions it displays it amongst OTHER results. I click on it because I tend to like their articles. I say the stat is what the stat it says it is. Wikipedia visitors tend to use Google more than other search engines to get there. I personally Google something with "wiki" thrown in as a keyword at the end so I can get to the correct Wikipedia article.
dennisgorelik 15y ago
Could it be the result of Google lobbying for underestimating their search market share (due to antitrust concerns) and Yahoo/Bing are lobbying for overestimating their market share?
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- sondh 15y ago
  I don't think so (but your thought is very interesting anyway) because when Bing lobbies to get higher stats, they may get higher ads revenue but in the long run, particularly in the FTC investigation, they will run into bigger trouble. But yeah, this is just my guess...
jessriedel 15y ago
> That seems high indeed, but everyone I talk to "in the wild" who runs high traffic sites actually sees a much higher percentage of their search engine traffic coming from Google, usually from 80-90%. Wouldn't the people that Gabriel Weinberg talks to be people who run websites much more likely to be frequented by the highly tech literate? Seems like a fantastically biased data set.
- epi0Bauqu 15y ago
  Nope, the people I was referring to for the most part run sites targeted at the general public not techies.
  - acangiano 15y ago
    Yup. See my comment about my wife's blogs above. Sites for absolutely non-technical audiences get 80+% of all their organic traffic, from Google.
  - jessriedel 15y ago
    I have no idea who you talk to, but I'll say this: just because you target your website at the general public doesn't mean that your user bases isn't significantly slanted toward techies. It's not just the subject of a website that can bias is like this; it can just be their size, or their newness.
    - epi0Bauqu 15y ago
      You can generally tell by browser share breakdown as I mentioned in the post wrt to statcounter.
lacker 15y ago
I used to work on search quality at Google, but I think I can answer this just using public information. ;-) I think the answer is that Yahoo and Bing have a much higher rate of navigational queries - queries like [facebook] or [twitter.com] that are just the name of a site. This class of queries does indeed send a much higher proportion of their traffic to a small number of sites. The available public statistics seem to confirm this. One example is here: http://blog.alessiosignorini.com/2010/02/average-query-length-february-2010/ http://blog.alessiosignorini.com/2010/02/average-query-lengt... I'm sure they're not perfect, but let's assume these numbers are reasonable. Single-word queries are a decent proxy for navigational queries. 27% of Google's searches are one word, but 54% of Yahoo's searches are one word. So if you were measuring on any site that didn't get one-word traffic, you would see Google's searches overrepresented by 1.5X already. This makes sense if you think about it. The sort of person that searches on non-Google search engines is very different than the sort of person that searches on Google. People who search on non-Google are much more likely to generally not understand the internet. They are likely to just use the search engine that was preinstalled when they got the computer. They are likely to not understand the difference between a URL bar and a search box. And they are likely to only use search for typing in the name of a site and directly going there.
- w1ntermute 15y ago
  > I think the answer is that Yahoo and Bing have a much higher rate of navigational queries - queries like [facebook] or [twitter.com] that are just the name of a site. This class of queries does indeed send a much higher proportion of their traffic to a small number of sites. > This makes sense if you think about it. The sort of person that searches on non-Google search engines is very different than the sort of person that searches on Google. People who search on non-Google are much more likely to generally not understand the internet. They are likely to just use the search engine that was preinstalled when they got the computer. They are likely to not understand the difference between a URL bar and a search box. And they are likely to only use search for typing in the name of a site and directly going there. From observing non-tech savvy people using the internet, what I've found is that a lot of times, they know about Google and use it when they want to consciously make a search. But when they just want to access a site, they will type just the name of the site into the URL bar, which with modern browsers increasingly results in a search. This method of searching uses the default search engine, which is often altered from Google even in browsers like Chrome due to these non-tech savvy people installing various software that changes the default search engine. But when these people want to do an "actual" search, they literally go to http://www.google.com/ http://www.google.com/ and type in the search query there. What's interesting is that a lot of times, they'll accidentally search with the default browser search instead, and they don't even realize that they're not using Google, which leads me to believe that they don't realize that there are different search engines, or that depending on whether they use their browser's default search or go to http://www.google.com/ http://www.google.com/, they will get different search results. I would be really interested to understand what goes through the minds of these people when they use the internet, because these sorts of things just scream out at me when I watch them browsing the web, but they seem to be completely oblivious to it. I just don't understand how they can miss the completely different site layout and URL.
Matt_Cutts 15y ago
The article mentions "What makes this even weirder is Hitwise also recently came out with a report saying Bing/Yahoo users click on more links than Google users." This is a metric that Hitwise calls success rate and they say Yahoo has the most successful searches. I did a debunk of Hitwise's "success rate" metric back in February: https://plus.google.com/109412257237874861202/posts/A7d5joZ3tJJ https://plus.google.com/109412257237874861202/posts/A7d5joZ3... In essence, I don't think Hitwise can tell a the difference between a click on a search result vs. just going to a different site. So doing a search and then leaving looks just like a success to them. For example, yahoo.com has a "Trending" box in the top-right of the page, and clicking on Rose McGowan will do a Yahoo search. If the user goes anywhere after that search, I believe Hitwise will call that a successful search. Likewise on msn.com, if you click many of the links, e.g. "Pencil skirts that will turn heads" that actually does a search on Bing. I believe going anywhere else on the web afterwards will again look like a successful search to Hitwise. I think a large amount of casual browsing on Yahoo/MSN is counted as "successful searches" by Hitwise.
nextparadigms 15y ago
Is it just me or is Hitwise acting pretty aggressively/misleading against Google lately? It started last month with some of their Google+ stat numbers, and it's been at least 2 more such cases lately.
powertower 15y ago
According to Google Analytics, Google is 97.3% of my search engine traffic.
- usaar333 15y ago
  Tech heavy site? I'm doing 98.3% Google here. (ignoring the mysterious search engine called 'search')
citricsquid 15y ago
I'll share some figures for some gaming sites from google analytics, these are global though, does anyone know how to narrow down by country with ga? site a: 110m page views past 30 days, 51% Search engine traffic, google is 95%+ site b: 90m page views past 30 days, 77% Search engine traffic, google is 95%+
acangiano 15y ago
My programming blog gets 99.35% of its search engine traffic from Google. AnyNewBooks.com: 96.44% My math blog: 92.91% OK, those are technical or for a tech savvy crowd. How about my wife's vintage blog which attracts mainly a non-technical female demographic? 84.08%. Or her Girl Guides' blog? 78.74%. My father in law's local renovation site: 81.48%. Not a single site out of a couple of dozen I've access to, shows anything less than 75%. With these numbers at hand, I have a really hard time believing that Google's market share is anything below 75-80%.
earl 15y ago
Traffic sources for the last calendar month as measured by GA: [google, yahoo, bing] my blog about R, bash, and whatever crosses my mind: http://blog.earlh.com http://blog.earlh.com : [1.4k, 9, 9] my gf's blog about her life and our dog: http://danceswithcorgis.com http://danceswithcorgis.com : [877, 37, 14] edit: see also acangiano's blogs: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2881340 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2881340
kenjackson 15y ago
IMO, there is little question that Google's search numbers are higher. This is one reason why I think US antitrust probes are more justified given some of their actions (not saying they've done anything wrong necessarily, but prudence is advised). This also explains why MS search revenue is lower than expected. People don't click ads in navigational searches.
bauchidgw 15y ago
well on most SEO conferences there is the agreement that a good search optimized site gets at least 90 % from its search traffic via google in the us market. in other western markets (i.e. germany) google has a market share of 98% plus and we are fine with it. said that, one of my sites only gets 28% of its search traffic in the us market via google, but it has a penalty on most of its pages (everything but the startpage and its blog is banned from google and with good reason) so its an outlier.
minikomi 15y ago
Would like to see the equivalent of Japan ... Yahoo.jp has a ridiculous market share here (especially amongst the pre-smartphone market - which is huge). Edit: best I could find was from 2009 which puts yahoo at 51% over google at 39%[1]. However, google seems to be partnering with yahoojp to help them improve their search technology[2]. [1]http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2009/3/Japan_Search_Engine_Rankings http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2009/3/J... [2]http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201012020342.html http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201012020342.html
trotsky 15y ago
I saw traffic numbers $HUGE_ISP last year and google was pulling almost 85% in search. That was by number of bits shifted, not impressions - I'm not sure how that would change it. If you're really interested, I'd reach out to sandvine. They are on net at several majors and they gather tons of information and are allowed to share it. They might take some time out from writing breathless press releases about netflix traffic to kick you some numbers, all good publicity. I think volume on a large national ISP is likely to be a much better metric than trackers.

87 points by pardo 15y ago

as far as anyone is concerned Google does indeed have a monopoly on search...Bing spent something like 150 million to bump their share by a few percentage points And it's not like Google's product is that much better than Bing...the difference is really miniscule...but that's the problem...Google is good enough so to beat them you really need to bring something truly revolutionary to the table

seanalltogether 15y ago

Not many people realize this, but wikipedia makes all their stat information public. http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOrigins.htm http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOrigi... As a top 10 site with a pretty broad appeal I'd say they are one of the best gauges of internet users. Google represents at least 90% of search engine references coming in to that site.

epi0Bauqu 15y ago
Is that a global number or just the US? If global, is it possible to segment to US?
- seanalltogether 15y ago
  I believe it's global, but if someone wanted to do the legwork to determine US only, all the log files are uploaded on an hourly basis here http://dammit.lt/wikistats/ http://dammit.lt/wikistats/
jellicle 15y ago
This is basically a measure of which search engine promotes Wikipedia links more heavily in their algorithm, not a measure of the search engine's market share....
- ashishgandhi 15y ago
  If I'm looking for an article on something and Google thinks Wikipedia is one of the solutions it displays it amongst OTHER results. I click on it because I tend to like their articles. I say the stat is what the stat it says it is. Wikipedia visitors tend to use Google more than other search engines to get there. I personally Google something with "wiki" thrown in as a keyword at the end so I can get to the correct Wikipedia article.

dennisgorelik 15y ago

Could it be the result of Google lobbying for underestimating their search market share (due to antitrust concerns) and Yahoo/Bing are lobbying for overestimating their market share?

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
sondh 15y ago
I don't think so (but your thought is very interesting anyway) because when Bing lobbies to get higher stats, they may get higher ads revenue but in the long run, particularly in the FTC investigation, they will run into bigger trouble. But yeah, this is just my guess...

jessriedel 15y ago

> That seems high indeed, but everyone I talk to "in the wild" who runs high traffic sites actually sees a much higher percentage of their search engine traffic coming from Google, usually from 80-90%. Wouldn't the people that Gabriel Weinberg talks to be people who run websites much more likely to be frequented by the highly tech literate? Seems like a fantastically biased data set.

epi0Bauqu 15y ago
Nope, the people I was referring to for the most part run sites targeted at the general public not techies.
- acangiano 15y ago
  Yup. See my comment about my wife's blogs above. Sites for absolutely non-technical audiences get 80+% of all their organic traffic, from Google.
- jessriedel 15y ago
  I have no idea who you talk to, but I'll say this: just because you target your website at the general public doesn't mean that your user bases isn't significantly slanted toward techies. It's not just the subject of a website that can bias is like this; it can just be their size, or their newness.
  - epi0Bauqu 15y ago
    You can generally tell by browser share breakdown as I mentioned in the post wrt to statcounter.

lacker 15y ago

I used to work on search quality at Google, but I think I can answer this just using public information. ;-) I think the answer is that Yahoo and Bing have a much higher rate of navigational queries - queries like [facebook] or [twitter.com] that are just the name of a site. This class of queries does indeed send a much higher proportion of their traffic to a small number of sites. The available public statistics seem to confirm this. One example is here: http://blog.alessiosignorini.com/2010/02/average-query-length-february-2010/ http://blog.alessiosignorini.com/2010/02/average-query-lengt... I'm sure they're not perfect, but let's assume these numbers are reasonable. Single-word queries are a decent proxy for navigational queries. 27% of Google's searches are one word, but 54% of Yahoo's searches are one word. So if you were measuring on any site that didn't get one-word traffic, you would see Google's searches overrepresented by 1.5X already. This makes sense if you think about it. The sort of person that searches on non-Google search engines is very different than the sort of person that searches on Google. People who search on non-Google are much more likely to generally not understand the internet. They are likely to just use the search engine that was preinstalled when they got the computer. They are likely to not understand the difference between a URL bar and a search box. And they are likely to only use search for typing in the name of a site and directly going there.

w1ntermute 15y ago
> I think the answer is that Yahoo and Bing have a much higher rate of navigational queries - queries like [facebook] or [twitter.com] that are just the name of a site. This class of queries does indeed send a much higher proportion of their traffic to a small number of sites. > This makes sense if you think about it. The sort of person that searches on non-Google search engines is very different than the sort of person that searches on Google. People who search on non-Google are much more likely to generally not understand the internet. They are likely to just use the search engine that was preinstalled when they got the computer. They are likely to not understand the difference between a URL bar and a search box. And they are likely to only use search for typing in the name of a site and directly going there. From observing non-tech savvy people using the internet, what I've found is that a lot of times, they know about Google and use it when they want to consciously make a search. But when they just want to access a site, they will type just the name of the site into the URL bar, which with modern browsers increasingly results in a search. This method of searching uses the default search engine, which is often altered from Google even in browsers like Chrome due to these non-tech savvy people installing various software that changes the default search engine. But when these people want to do an "actual" search, they literally go to http://www.google.com/ http://www.google.com/ and type in the search query there. What's interesting is that a lot of times, they'll accidentally search with the default browser search instead, and they don't even realize that they're not using Google, which leads me to believe that they don't realize that there are different search engines, or that depending on whether they use their browser's default search or go to http://www.google.com/ http://www.google.com/, they will get different search results. I would be really interested to understand what goes through the minds of these people when they use the internet, because these sorts of things just scream out at me when I watch them browsing the web, but they seem to be completely oblivious to it. I just don't understand how they can miss the completely different site layout and URL.

Matt_Cutts 15y ago

The article mentions "What makes this even weirder is Hitwise also recently came out with a report saying Bing/Yahoo users click on more links than Google users." This is a metric that Hitwise calls success rate and they say Yahoo has the most successful searches. I did a debunk of Hitwise's "success rate" metric back in February: https://plus.google.com/109412257237874861202/posts/A7d5joZ3tJJ https://plus.google.com/109412257237874861202/posts/A7d5joZ3... In essence, I don't think Hitwise can tell a the difference between a click on a search result vs. just going to a different site. So doing a search and then leaving looks just like a success to them. For example, yahoo.com has a "Trending" box in the top-right of the page, and clicking on Rose McGowan will do a Yahoo search. If the user goes anywhere after that search, I believe Hitwise will call that a successful search. Likewise on msn.com, if you click many of the links, e.g. "Pencil skirts that will turn heads" that actually does a search on Bing. I believe going anywhere else on the web afterwards will again look like a successful search to Hitwise. I think a large amount of casual browsing on Yahoo/MSN is counted as "successful searches" by Hitwise.

nextparadigms 15y ago

Is it just me or is Hitwise acting pretty aggressively/misleading against Google lately? It started last month with some of their Google+ stat numbers, and it's been at least 2 more such cases lately.

powertower 15y ago

According to Google Analytics, Google is 97.3% of my search engine traffic.

usaar333 15y ago
Tech heavy site? I'm doing 98.3% Google here. (ignoring the mysterious search engine called 'search')

citricsquid 15y ago

I'll share some figures for some gaming sites from google analytics, these are global though, does anyone know how to narrow down by country with ga? site a: 110m page views past 30 days, 51% Search engine traffic, google is 95%+ site b: 90m page views past 30 days, 77% Search engine traffic, google is 95%+

acangiano 15y ago

My programming blog gets 99.35% of its search engine traffic from Google. AnyNewBooks.com: 96.44% My math blog: 92.91% OK, those are technical or for a tech savvy crowd. How about my wife's vintage blog which attracts mainly a non-technical female demographic? 84.08%. Or her Girl Guides' blog? 78.74%. My father in law's local renovation site: 81.48%. Not a single site out of a couple of dozen I've access to, shows anything less than 75%. With these numbers at hand, I have a really hard time believing that Google's market share is anything below 75-80%.

earl 15y ago

Traffic sources for the last calendar month as measured by GA: [google, yahoo, bing] my blog about R, bash, and whatever crosses my mind: http://blog.earlh.com http://blog.earlh.com : [1.4k, 9, 9] my gf's blog about her life and our dog: http://danceswithcorgis.com http://danceswithcorgis.com : [877, 37, 14] edit: see also acangiano's blogs: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2881340 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2881340

kenjackson 15y ago

IMO, there is little question that Google's search numbers are higher. This is one reason why I think US antitrust probes are more justified given some of their actions (not saying they've done anything wrong necessarily, but prudence is advised). This also explains why MS search revenue is lower than expected. People don't click ads in navigational searches.

bauchidgw 15y ago

well on most SEO conferences there is the agreement that a good search optimized site gets at least 90 % from its search traffic via google in the us market. in other western markets (i.e. germany) google has a market share of 98% plus and we are fine with it. said that, one of my sites only gets 28% of its search traffic in the us market via google, but it has a penalty on most of its pages (everything but the startpage and its blog is banned from google and with good reason) so its an outlier.

minikomi 15y ago

Would like to see the equivalent of Japan ... Yahoo.jp has a ridiculous market share here (especially amongst the pre-smartphone market - which is huge). Edit: best I could find was from 2009 which puts yahoo at 51% over google at 39%[1]. However, google seems to be partnering with yahoojp to help them improve their search technology[2]. [1]http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2009/3/Japan_Search_Engine_Rankings http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2009/3/J... [2]http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201012020342.html http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201012020342.html

trotsky 15y ago

I saw traffic numbers $HUGE_ISP last year and google was pulling almost 85% in search. That was by number of bits shifted, not impressions - I'm not sure how that would change it. If you're really interested, I'd reach out to sandvine. They are on net at several majors and they gather tons of information and are allowed to share it. They might take some time out from writing breathless press releases about netflix traffic to kick you some numbers, all good publicity. I think volume on a large national ISP is likely to be a much better metric than trackers.