Google–Still King of Search
Yahoo and Microsoft have made a deal to share search. Bing is being advertised. What does this mean for search promotion strategy? Continue to go for just Google or consider others as well?
A recent survey is definitive: Google is still king. This issue reviews the survey results and recommends search promotion strategy based on those results.
The Survey
Comscore has released their search engine survey for September of 2010. It shows that Google has gained market share compared with its rivals, with Yahoo giving up that market share. Google now performs 66.1% of US searches, and the second contender, Yahoo, does 16.7%. Yahoo’s share declined by .7% as Google’s increased by just that amount. Bing is in third place with 11.2%, and there are no other competitors with market share above 5%. If we combine Yahoo’s and Microsoft’s market shares, they are still less than half of Google!
Google remains the real benchmark for search engine ranking–that is, if you can get well ranked in Google you’re likely to do well in Bing and Yahoo. It’s not the other way around–other search engines can be spammed and fooled into giving high ranking in situations where Google would remove you from their index.
The Bottom Line
Given that Google is both the hardest place to earn rank and the most important, the strategy is clear–study Google, go for search engine position in Google, and the others will follow, although they don’t matter nearly as much.
