March 2008 Search Engine Market Share Data

Everyone knows Google is the most used search engine, but I'm often asked what their (and their competitor's) actual market share is, so I thought I'd post these Nielsen/Netratings numbers for March that were included in a Nielsen Online press release from last week.  The press release also lists total number of searches and year-over-year growth for each engine in the top 10, so if you click on the link you can that data too.

1. Google 58.7% of searches
2. Yahoo 18.1%
3. MSN/Windows Live 12.0%
4. AOL 4.1%
5. Ask 2.4%
6. My Web 0.9%
7. Comcast 0.5%
8. NexTag 0.4%
9. AT&T Worldnet 0.3%
10. Dogpile 0.2%

I usually tell people the "Big Three" (Google, Yahoo & MSN) handle 90% of searches in the US and according to this data for March the number was 88.8%, so 90% is a pretty close estimate.

It's important to keep in mind this data is for total searches done on each engine and does not reflect paid search or "PPC" market share.  With respect to PPC, I am finding with my clients that Google gets about 3-4 times the traffic Yahoo Sponsored Search and the Yahoo is about 3 times to volume of MSN (Microsoft adCenter).