Microsoft saw its share of the market slip to 9 percent, down from 10.1 percent a month earlier.

Wow! When you reach that percentage level, losing even a half a point is painful.

Google, meanwhile, increased its lead, accounting for 55.2 percent of Web searches, up from 53.7 percent in March.

The Gorg continues to grow at a steady rate. :)

Yahoo grew its share to 21.9 percent, up narrowly from the 21.8 percent share it held in March.

Hehehe, Yahoo! battling itself for 2nd place.

While Ask.com held steady in fifth place with 1.8 percent of search queries.

I do believe Ask.com just made a major mistake in their advertising campaigns. There's a bit of roar going on right now over an Ask.com Billboard that is definitely "not in good taste".

That's pretty dismal news all round. No sign of any slipping of Google's dominant position.

Regarding ask.com, I've not seen this advert but with the %share they've got the old adage that any publicity is good publicity surely must apply.

Regarding ask.com, I've not seen this advert but with the %share they've got the old adage that any publicity is good publicity surely must apply.

I'm not too certain that applies in this instance. Its one of their "shock" billboard campaigns and it didn't go over real well with a large group of people. It hit a nerve...

www.flickr.com/photos/valleywagprime/479589346/

Back to the topic...

2005 November figures from Nielsen//NetRatings
Google has the largest share of U.S. based web searches with 46%, Yahoo is second with 23%, and MSN third with 11%.

Yes, the Gorg continues to assimilate while the others adjust. :)

2004 January
Google 39.4%, Yahoo! 30.4%, MSN 29.6%, AOL 15.5%, Ask 8.5%

Can anyone share their experience of the search engine history?

What's the name of the 1st popular SE? When was that? 1980's? Who then became popular and took over the 1st spot and when? .... until today, Google leads.

Can anyone share their experience of the search engine history?

Here's a brief outline...

1990 - Archie
1991 Apr - Gopher
1992 Dec - Veronica
1993 Mar - Jughead
1993 Nov - Aliweb
1994 Jan - Galaxy
1994 Apr - Yahoo!
1994 Apr - WebCrawler
1994 Jul - Lycos
1995 Feb - Infoseek
1995 May - SavvySearch
1995 Jun - MetaCrawler
1995 Aug - Magellan
1995 Sep - Inktomi
1995 Oct - Excite
1995 Dec - AltaVista
1996 - Dogpile
1996 - Mamma
1996 Jan - BackRub
1996 Apr - Alexa
1996 May - HotBot
1996 Oct - LookSmart
1997 - GoTo
1997 Apr - Ask Jeeves
1997 Jul - FAST Search
1997 Aug - Northern Light
1998 Apr - Direct Hit
1998 Jun - ODP/dMOZ
1998 Sep - Google
1998 Sep - MSN Search
1999 - About.com
1999 Nov - NBCi/Snap
1999 Aug - AlltheWeb

I'll stop at 1999. Everything from 2000 onwards was a hodgepodge effort by various entities to get a piece of the search landscape. By that time, Google had already embedded its tenacles and they were growing quickly. They haven't looked back since. Hey Google, how about a little BackRub. :)

We've definitely seen a Merge and Purge over the years.

Microsoft saw its share of the market slip to 9 percent, down from 10.1 percent a month earlier. Google, meanwhile, increased its lead, accounting for 55.2 percent of Web searches, up from 53.7 percent in March. Yahoo grew its share to 21.9 percent, up narrowly from the 21.8 percent share it held in March.

Boy I don't know about these numbers. The world we live in its more like;

Google; 75%
Yahoo; 15%
MSN; 5%
all the rest; 5%

55% for Google is way below what we experience, and 10% for MSN is just impossibly high. Others experiences may be quite different but every time one of these things come out, it just doesn't do justice to whats really going on in the world. According to this you could just skip Google and still catch 30% of the total traffic pie?

Great post on the historical list of search engines by the way.

Funny this topic came up now, I was just looking at my logs for the last year, about 3 million page views and thinking that MSN had pretty much died in Search. I'm seeing figures in line with those posted by Randle. Honestly I think Microsoft could just pull the plug on live.com; they lost, game over for them.

What's the name of the 1st popular SE?

Back then? I believe it was Archie.

55% for Google is way below what we experience, and 10% for MSN is just impossibly high.

Traffic from MSN? Yeah, huge. But only this poorly designed live-spider is creating that.

Interesting thread this one.

Here's a brief outline...

1990 - Archie
1991 Apr - Gopher
1992 Dec - Veronica

And this surprised me...

Google have pretty much got search sewn up. They do it right and they do it good in my opinion, very rarely unhappy with the results I receive.

I've gone back and dabbled with MSN, Yahoo, etc. etc. But apart from the results - I just don't like what I see and its even simple things down to the page display time and the fonts used. Google have got the formula right... and they know it, so does everybody else?

Is something good so bad?

I think not.

Ask showed so much promise not so long ago. But they seem intent on making themselves in the image of Google, which is not a winning strategy. Yahoo and MSN have the advantage of diversified business, and can link in with other online endeavors. Search is just one piece of the puzzle for them.
Ask needs to offer something that Google doesn't.
Even their latest advertising pitch - "the algorithm" - is trying to get kudos for exactly the thing that propeled Google to fame. Google, not Ask, is famous for "the algorithm" (the Pagerank algorithm). This is a loser.
I admire them for being able to keep up with Google the the extent that they do. They have good results and nice tools, but while they just run around in the shadow of the big G, they will never get noticed.
Differentiation is key.
Ask seems to not realize that.

What I find interesting is how much some (Ask) try to follow Google's lead and have, as others have pointed out, little in the way of innovation. And with the interesting new ways Google is looking to change search, with Maps mashups, timelines, imaging etc.. I can easily see a monopoly as strong as Microsoft enjoys on the OS front (although it is slipping..).

55% for Google is way below what we experience, and 10% for MSN is just impossibly high. Others experiences may be quite different but every time one of these things come out, it just doesn't do justice to whats really going on in the world. According to this you could just skip Google and still catch 30% of the total traffic pie?

Google has an overwhelming share of my search referrals, with Yahoo and MSN far behind. And it isn't as if I did terribly in Yahoo and MSN: I could cite strings for which I rank #1 in Google, Yahoo, and MSN but get significant (or even noticeable) traffic only from Google.

As far as I can tell, my target audience just isn't using Yahoo or MSN--and I cater to a mainstream audience, not to techies or academics who might be expected to prefer Google over more "consumery" alternatives. So who is using those other search engines?

So, who do you think uses Yahoo! and MSN Live? Is it mostly those that use the portal interface complete with search?

Or those who don't know and just use the default search out of the box, usually MSN?

And then of course the rest of the traffic is us. ;)

Hehehe, take a look at the above historical list. Look at all of those search engines before Google. Then look what happens after Google. :)

Google has an overwhelming share of my search referrals

I must get at least 80% of my referrals from Google. I think the people who use Yahoo and MSN, etc., are kids who never heard of Google, not because they think those old crusty engines are better. :-}

Does Yahoo have a search bar? I like the Google one and its dynamic suggestions; its interesting to see what others seek, esp. for SEO.

p/g

Does Yahoo have a search bar?

Yes. My wife's computer has both toolbars installed (Google and Yahoo). The Yahoo toolbar does a lot of the same things as the Google search bar. For example, just like Google, it can remember recent searches for you. However, unlike Google, it doesn't do dynamic suggestions.
There's one different feature it has that Google doesn't have. If you search for widgets, a little drop-down message will say "search for widgets in..." and if you click on that, you get a menu.
The menu has the following: web, travel, images, video, news, answers, flickr, local, myweb, current site.
It's a clever way of gently guiding the user back to Yahoo websites and products.

MSN, AOL, and Ask all have toolbars as well.

I use Google because the page loads faster. All I need is just the search box.

Yahoo and MSN have squeezed too much content/links onto their main page and so takes a longer time to load. Therefore, it takes a longer time to complete my job.

I bet more people will use Yahoo / MSN if they keep the page clean instead of cluttering it with all sorts of links.

> I use Google because the page loads faster. All I need is just the search box.

Live.Com is in many ways a "google clone page." It looks nice and loads quickly with nothing more than a search box on the main page. And the search results don't look much different than Google's either.

I actually like Live.Com...both the layout and the search results. Too bad nobody uses the thing.

if you want fast loading Yahoo, don't use Yahoo's main page.
Instead, go to search.yahoo.com.
It has a search box, some plain text links to a handful of news headlines, and that's about it.

Boy I don't know about these numbers. The world we live in its more like;

Google; 75%
Yahoo; 15%
MSN; 5%
all the rest; 5%

55% for Google is way below what we experience, and 10% for MSN is just impossibly high...

Nope my numbers are pretty much the same for Google and yahoo, but MSN accounts for 0.2%, while AOL makes up about 2%

This is USA-only view

Outside of USA - and I have a number of bilingual sites - I am really surprised but the numbers OP posted are close to what I see. The SE traffic splits like that:

G$ - 55-65%
Y! - 10%
MSN - 3%
Other, language-specific SEs - 17%-25%

What could scew these numbers is the fact that we follow Google's guidelines, so we are probably "optimized" better for its engine, hence more traffic. I bet if we would spend more time on local SEs, their share could grow closer to 50%.

No wonder Google just started an advertising campaign (!) in our language-specific segment of the internet.