Comments on: Google’s Search Market Share?

By: Alex Loddengaard

Alex Loddengaard — Sun, 25 May 2008 06:36:10 +0000

Yeah I know I know. Sunil and Clint shined light on this bias as well. I’m still sticking with my gut-level intuition of 60% being too little, but I’ll definitely disagree with my previous claim of over 90%.

Thanks for the comment, CW.

By: CW

CW — Sun, 25 May 2008 06:33:38 +0000

Dude,

You need to consider that your demographic is entirely google bias. You are a software engineer.

By: Alex Loddengaard

Alex Loddengaard — Sat, 24 May 2008 02:47:24 +0000

Good point, jsalvati. The search industry is much different than say the cell phone industry in that regard. Still, I don’t believe 60%. Thanks for the comment!

By: jsalvati

jsalvati — Sat, 24 May 2008 01:15:52 +0000

What’s interesting is that even if Google has “only” a 60% market share, there still isn’t a whole lot of competition between search engines; people who us Google stick with Google, and people who use Yahoo stick with Yahoo. It seems to me that very few people actively search for better search engines.

By: Alex Loddengaard

Alex Loddengaard — Fri, 23 May 2008 05:24:48 +0000

Sean, most of my sites do have a majority of Firefox users, which proves Sunil’s point. However, I have seen some friends’ analytics that show IE being as commonly used as Firefox.

Sunil, agreed that this is a poor statistical analysis. I think many of the points you and Clint have raised are valid, but I still think 60% is a big undershot. I know plenty of people that use Internet Explorer and use Google. Perhaps my 90% claim is high, but I have a strong, gut-level instinct that 60% is way too low. Regardless, thank for the input!

By: Sunil Garg

Sunil Garg — Fri, 23 May 2008 02:24:52 +0000

Roughly, your sample is biased towards American interests, a young audience (which likely has Firefox installed and uses Gmail), and has a limited audience (if 1000 uniques is the most trafficked site in the list).

Between people who use IE, never bother to change their homepage from MSN (this is a huge number if you talk to people at Microsoft); people who use Yahoo because they use Yahoo Mail, etc.; and the completely different numbers in terms of international search market share, I think 60% is quite believable.

By: Sean

Sean — Fri, 23 May 2008 01:30:06 +0000

I bet Google Analytics on those sites also tells you that Firefox has great market share.

By: Clint

Clint — Fri, 23 May 2008 00:05:14 +0000

Windows Live search gets a huge boost out of being the default setting in IE7, which is an intentional confusion further pushed by just how similar the color scheme and layout is to Google’s.

By: Alex Loddengaard

Alex Loddengaard — Thu, 22 May 2008 22:46:33 +0000

I specifically didn’t post the sample sizes because some of those sites technically aren’t mine. I can tell you that some of those sites get around 1000 uniques a month and others get about 50 uniques a month.

By: jsalvati

jsalvati — Thu, 22 May 2008 22:44:07 +0000

Post your sample sizes and we’ll do the numbers.