Google continues to dominate search

With the holiday shopping season in full swing across the United States, more and more consumers are conducting searches to find those last few gifts. And most of them are turning to Google for their information.

by Kristina Knight

According to the latest information from Hitwise Google accounted for more than 65% of November searches. Yahoo, meanwhile, accounted for just over 22% of US searches and MSN's Live Search accounted for 7%. The Ask.com engine was responsible for just over 4.5% of US searches.

Both Yahoo and MSN fell in a year-over-year comparison of November search totals. In 2006, Yahoo users performed more than 22% of searches and MSN users conducted just under 10% of searches.

Just how much influence do search engines have for marketing segments? According to the result, quite a bit. The research shows that Google's search engine pushed about 44% of the traffic to health and medical websites in November. The search giant was also responsible for 33% of the traffic to travel websites, 25% of shopping/classified website traffic and 21% of the traffic to news/information website traffic.

Results have been similar to the November findings for more than a year. Google seems to account for more and more search engine traffic, which Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com fight for the leftovers. Still, marketers should not discount the other engines. Yahoo, MSN and the like may draw in fewer searches, but users continually return to these search engines for needed information; to ignore these engines would be to ignore the users who turn to Yahoo, MSN or other search engines.