EightBlack.

This piece courtesy AdNews. It just shows how big the gap is for Yahoo! and Microsoft Live to close if they want to compete with Google at “vanilla” search. In some respects, it’s the very reason Mahalo, MyLiveSearch, ASK and others are pursuing completely different models.

Jerry Yang at Yahoo! has got to be doing some soul searching and you can bet Ballmer at Microsoft threw another chair at the wall when this latest Comscore report came out. I’m looking forward to seeing Steve next week speak live on Day 2 of Web 2.0 in the US. I personally think John Battelle is going to go easy on him for fear of him blowing a valve in public. Or something like that.

Anyway, back to search. Here’s some data that puts Googles’ massive share into perspective.

(Data courtesy Comscore)

My ignorance in looking at this chart is that I wasn’t even aware that Korea had its own search portal. Nor did I realise that the Chinese search platform, Baidu, had so much critical mass - given the censored content it provides.

Of the 61 billion searches conducted in August this year, Google had 37 billion of them (60%), 4 times that of Yahoo! and over 18 times more than Microsoft. Sixty per cent share of any market is massive, some would say too dominant. My take is that Google is just getting started.

When Battelle wrote “The Search” I remember a quote by the 2 founders of Google stating that they thought that the whole “area” of search was only 10% solved. Now, 2-3 years on, they might say that they are closer to 20%. But there’s still a long way to go.

There’s a lot of money being spent on local search - for good reason. It’s essentially the domain of the printed directories, like Yellow. And Google knows this, knows what money is at stake, and wants a piece of the action.

I don’t think the average person switches search engines easily. The advantage Google has is that its now a part of our DNA, our dictionary and vocabulary.

My question to you is this. What would make YOU switch?

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 12th, 2007 at 1:28 pm and is filed under Google, Microsoft, Search Engines, Yahoo!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.