Nielsen/Netratings Reports on Search Market Share

Last week Nielsen/Netratings released the August 2007 results on the top 10 search providers in the United States.

Not surprisingly, Google continues to reign supreme, taking home 53.6% of searches and recording a 39.8% year-over-year growth in total searches. According to Nielsen, they recorded nearly 4.2 billion searches — in August alone. That amounts to nearly 50 billion searches a year, a number which is simply impossible to fathom. That averages out to over 166 searches in Google annually for every adult, child, and baby in the United States.

Following not even close to the heels of Google was Yahoo, tallying a 19.9% share of searches.

The biggest gainer in the bunch was MSN, which recorded over a billion searches in August, and had 69.8% year over year growth. They came in third with a 12.9% share of searches.  I can only assume that this massive jump is due to the release of the Windows Vista OS, which come loaded with MSN search as the default search preference for users.

Looking at these numbers, it is hard to fathom anybody truly challenging Google’s lead. There are still plenty of ways that Google can trip up, from the recent privacy concerns to simply the law of large numbers preventing Google from continuing such absurd growth (though this still does not diminish their market share, just potentially their sky-high stock price).

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