Whoohoo...Search continues to grow at a ridiculous pace and the advertising "trend" catches on in the mainstream, and search engine usage continues to rise. From MediaWeek:
In October, Nielsen//NetRatings recorded 5.1 billion total search queries, which was up 15 percent from just five months earlier. Thus, as MSN, Google and Yahoo! continue to battle for share of the search market, they appear to be going after an expanding search pie.
Google maintained its dominance in the search universe, accounting for nearly 2.5 billion searches in October, up 21 percent versus June activity. That figure gives the Mountain View, Calif., company a commanding 48 percent share of all searches.Meanwhile Yahoo! is pulling in 22 percent of searches, seeing a 16 percent uptick in volume over the measured five month period. The third and fourth positions are held by MSN, which commands 11 percent of queries, and AOL, with 7 percent.
The search engine exhibiting the largest growth during the measuring period was AskJeeves, which saw its search queries soar by 77 percent, though Barry Diller's Web asset still claims less than 3 percent of the market.
Looks like it's going to be a happy holiday - and an even happier new year - in this vertical!
There really is an arms race taking place in the search space, leading to better search results for users. The ratio of time spent online to dollars used for advertising online is still way out of whack, so there is still plenty of growth potential in this vertical.
That's certainly reflected in Google's stock price.
Posted by: Ed Kohler | December 30, 2005 at 01:58 PM