Stakes multiply in search wars
Published: 17 Feb 2004 15:35 GMT
Internet surfers flocked to Google in recent years for its targeted search results and minimalist style, helping make it the No. 1 search engine when measuring the overall number of searches conducted on its site. Google had a meteoric rise among Web searchers following its first major search licensing deal with Yahoo in 1999 and then with America Online two years later. Google doubled its share of total searches in the last two years, according to ComScore, at the expense of rivals.
To measure people's loyalty to search engines, ComScore compared the average number of times that people conducted a search in December with the average number of searches at Google, Yahoo, AOL and MSN. On average, those surveyed searched 28 times in the month. Google users came closest to that average, searching the site about 23 times. Yahoo and AOL users searched an average of 16 times, and MSN users 11 times.
That suggests that people commonly turn to alternatives for search results. And Yahoo and MSN have an opportunity to turn drive-by searchers into loyalists.
None of the top search engines serve the needs of half of the US Internet search audience, although Yahoo had the largest share with 48 percent, or 52 million of that population in December, while Google reached 44 percent, or 47 million. MSN helped 41 million people, and AOL 31 million.
"There's a huge amount of people out there that are not using search functionality," Lamberti said. "They've got a very large untapped audience base to push this functionality. About 60 percent of people on MSN aren't using search -- if they promote it, there's a good chance they'll get trial."
An undedicated bunch
Jupiter Media, another market researcher, plans to release data of its own that shows searchers are capricious. Although people commonly return to one search engine over and over, they often use two to three others as safeguards, Jupiter analyst Gary Stein said.
"It's not a zero-sum game," Stein said. "Toolbars, email don't seem to make much of a difference -- it doesn't lock out the competition."
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