April 09, 2009

While the news that Google is the search engine of choice by far is not ‘new’, it still amazes to hear that their lead is increasing. The increase year over year was 8% while there was a slight increase in the March ’09 over the February ’09 numbers. Google gets about 72% of the searches performed in the US.

Hit wise reports that Google’s gains are certainly coming at the expense of their major competitors. Yahoo year over year was down 19% and Live Search was down 17%. Love’em or hate’em Google sure is not showing signs of giving up its stranglehold on the search marketing industry. With this kind of data it’s no wonder that Yahoo is looking to shop its search business and venture into more social media plays.

As was reported a while back at Search Engine Land one change that is occurring is the increase in multi word searches. As searchers become more savvy over time it stands to reason that their search habits will get more sophisticated. Here’s the numbers that bear this out.

By category Google still has a strong influence but it is obvious that the economy is hurting the shopping sector. Sports, online video along with business and finance categories saw the largest percentage increase in Google’s share of creating traffic.

This information may start to become almost mundane considering the story is almost the same every month? Google up, the others down. Looks like Google wins again! Imagine the day when some competitor makes real inroads towards knocking Google off its perch. Now that will be news.