The search engine market at the end of 2009 is basically a tale of three companies – Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Our pie chart shows the share of overall searches for each of the main players using the latest figures from digital research provider comScore.
Clearly Google is the dominant search engine with a huge 65 per cent share of international searches, well ahead of Yahoo with 19 per cent and Microsoft with 9 per cent. Ask (4 per cent) and AOL (3 per cent) play bit part roles in today's search engine market.
It has been a heady rise for Google. Many people struggle to believe that precocious students Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the company as recently as September 1998. Using a friend's garage as their base of operations, they only settled on a name after misspelling the maths term 'googol'. Despite such unpromising omens, Google's combination of clever search algorithms and sophisticated ad programs like AdWords quickly propelled it to the top of the search engine market. It has stayed there ever since.
By contrast, Yahoo has had a torrid few years that were summed up when chief executive officer and co-founder Jerry Yang resigned at the end of 2008. However, the company has continued to lose search engine market share under the stewardship of new chief executive officer Carol Bartz. On July 29th 2009, Yahoo even agreed the unthinkable and appointed Microsoft's Bing as its exclusive natural and paid search platform. If the deal goes ahead as planned, the former king of search will soon only show results from Bing.
Microsoft has tried to muscle in on the search engine market for years with limited success. But Bing, the successor to MSN Live Search, could change all that. Launched in June 2009 with a reported £60 million marketing budget, Bing quickly established itself as a serious rival to Google. Total searches on Microsoft were up 22 per cent in a single month in August 2009, according to web research specialists The Nielsen Company, and comScore confirms that Bing is still on the up.
So this is the state of the search engine market at the end of 2009. Google is dominating, Yahoo is struggling and Microsoft is growing. Only time will tell if these trends continue in 2010.
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