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Industry Trends

Hitwise Confirms Google’s Dominance But Shows Discrepancies

By June 11, 2008July 30th, 2023No Comments

Hitwise released their search engine ratings, showing the market share of the various search engines for the month of May 2008. Google is the undisputed leader according to them too, but the margin of Google’s leadership is far greater according to their numbers than the results declared by comScore last week.

As was the case with the comScore search ratings discussed yesterday, the Hitwise ratings show that Google continues to rule the roost with a wide margin. According to Hitwise, Google holds 87.3 percent market share in the U.K., which is only marginally lower than their share in April 2008, and the main competitors, Yahoo! and Microsoft are far behind.

Similarly in the U.S.A, Google Search accounted for 68.3% of the market share, while Yahoo! received 20% and Microsoft had only 5.9% of total search traffic.

comScore, who have only released results for the month of April 2008 so far, show that Google holds a 74.4% share of the UK search market, while Yahoo! has 4.3% and Microsoft has 3.4% respectively.

While the variation in numbers between the results of different sites is understandable, as each group has different parameters to follow, what is common among all the results, is the obvious sway that Google continues to hold over the market.

Media planners, website owners and advertisers will not be particularly pleased with this discrepancy, though, as a difference of 13 percent in market share reported for Google search traffic to a site that receives 1 million visitors per month can mean a difference of 130,000 visits / ad impressions / clicks from Google. Such large discrepancies can make planning media campaigns for new sites quite difficult.

On the whole, though Google continues to make major gains in the online video, sports, business, finance, entertainment, social network and travel sectors.