I talked on the phone today (why yes, I do still use analog communication media…) with danah boyd, who took me to task for my last post. Her concern wasn’t with my negativity about Google, but about the extent to which the post made it seem that I’d become an unapologetic supporter of the Microsoft culture (or cult). Her argument was that in fact, Google doesn’t dominate search, it only dominates among the technocrats—much like Powerboks are the toy of choice for social software geeks, but not for the world at large.
I was a little taken aback by this, because I’d been fully convinced that Google’s dominant mindshare (when was the last time you heard someone use MSN or Yahoo as a verb meaning “search”?) reflected an equally dominant market share. My interest in seeing MSN succeed was never (and still isn’t) about having a Microsoft monopoly replace a Google monopoly—it was, and still is, about there being legitimate competion in this space. I don’t want anybody having a chokehold on online information access. So I set out to do some fact-checking. (I assume that the MSN Search folks have very detailed numbers, but I didn’t want to ask for anything that I couldn’t blog about.)
I started at the Pew Internet & American Life site, since they’re generally my favorite source of solid stats on Internet use. In May & June of 2004, they conducted a survey on search engine usage. They reported on the results in both a memo from August 2004 and a more detailed report in January of 2005—the relevant piece of this survey found that when asked “Which search engine do you use MOST OFTEN,” 47% of respondents replied Google , followed by Yahoo at 26%. MSN trailed well behind both at 7%.
In an attempt to find something more recent, I did some broader searches on search engine statistics and market share, and found a Business Week article from last month entitled “Google’s Leap May Slow Rival’s Growth.” The article opens with this paragraph:
Nearly a year after Google’s (GOOG ) IPO marked the start of a new phase in Web search competition, the upstart is making industry giants Microsoft’s (MSFT ) MSN and Yahoo! (YHOO ) look like also-rans. Google’s share of U.S. searches hit 52% in June, up from 45% a year ago, according to Web analytics firm WebSideStory Inc. By contrast, Yahoo’s and MSN’s share slipped to 25% and 10% respectively. Says Mark S. Mahaney, an analyst at Smith Barney Citigroup (C ): “People haven’t been given a good reason to switch from Google.”
I also found an article from February 2005 on SearchEngineWatch by Danny Sullivan, in which he cites data received from comScore. The results he cites show Google with a 35% share, Yahoo with a 32% share, and MSN with a 16% share. Here’s how Danny describes that data:
The comScore Media Metrix qSearch service measures search-specific traffic on the internet. qSearch data is gathered by monitoring the web activities of 1.5 million English-speakers worldwide (1 million in the United States) via proxy metering.Proxy metering allows comScore to see exactly how those within its panel have surfed the web. From this data, the company then extracts activity that’s considered to be specifically search-related.
[…] The qSearch figures are search-specific but not necessarily web-search specific. For example, a search performed at Yahoo Sports would count toward Yahoo’s overall total. That’s important to understand.
So, what am I missing? I can’t find any evidence that my perception of Google as the dominant player in this market is incorrect. If you know of research that contradicts this conclusion, I’d really love to know about it—please add a comment with a cite!
Right now, I don’t think that Microsoft’s search product is as good as Google’s. And I think that what Yahoo is doing with MyWeb is in fact the killer app of search. My working with MSN for a year isn’t going to suddenly catapult the company into a monopoly on web search (although it is giving me a fascinating view into how corporate culture influences the direction of products, not always in a good way). But I do think there’s value in evening the playing field. Microsoft is going after search market share—that’s a given. If I’m here, I can try to help them do it in a way that benefits the users of their service. If I’m not here, they only thing that changes is that my input into the product disappears. My presence has no impact on Microsoft’s business practices or goals. But it might well result in some influence on the direction of their product development, and I’m okay with that.
At the end of the day, I still harbor a healthy distrust of most corporations and their cultures, regardless of how much I like the people that work there, or the products they produce.
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Update, 2:51pm
SearchEngineWatch has a few other articles on market share. This one provides the May 2005 Nielsen NetRating figures, showing Google with 48%, Yahoo with 21.2%, and MSN with 12.4%.
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