Google ahead in search-engine league

By Steve Malone

Posted on 29 Apr 2003 at 16:02

Google is the most popular search engine in the English-speaking world, even though Yahoo retains its position in the US.

These are the conclusions of a new survey known as qSearch from the comScore Media Metrix group. qSearch attempts to measure the search behaviour amongst its 1.5 million users who have agreed to have their web behaviour tracked.

To no real surprise comScore MM has found that searching is dominated by the big four of Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL. Google sites control the largest share of searches conducted by global English-speaking Internet users, accounting for 33 per cent of all searches.

In the US, perhaps surprisingly, Yahoo performs 26 per cent of the 790 million average weekly U.S. searches, slightly ahead of Google on 23 per cent. MSN Search is third with 19 per cent of worldwide searches and 17 per cent of the US with AOL's scores being 12 per cent and 20 per cent respectively.

Yahoo's US lead is accounted for by the various services like mail and Yahoo Yellow Pages. The survey shows that more than half of total searches at Yahoo came from these channels, indicating that a reliance upon unique visitors to Yahoo Search as a measure of search behaviour does not account for the majority of actual Yahoo search activity. Of course the underlying search engine of Yahoo is currently Google.

Delving deeper, qSearch throws up some surprises. When looking at `Visitor-to-Searcher conversion` - i.e. the number of visitors who actually perform a search when they get there, Google at 82 per cent still comes out top as that is all that it does. This compares with say Yahoo, which has put a big investment in extending its brand to other non-search services.

Other sites with a high conversion rate are Dogpile which offers metasearch and Ask Jeeves which is founded on its natural language interface. Clearly both of these sites have found themselves niches in amongst the Google and Yahoo superpowers.

Curiously enough, the survey discovered that 51 per cent of total MSN searches were performed by users at work compared with Google and Yahoo with 45 per cent and 41 per cent respectively. To no-one's surprise AOL topped the home search ratings at 64 per cent.