The latest numbers from ComScore show Google’s share of the search market continuing a slow downward trend, coming in at 62.6% of US search market share in June of 2010. Does this foretell the dethroning of Google as some predict or is it merely a statistical blip?
To start with, for the past several years, we’ve seen Google achieving an effective market share more in the 70-75% range. How do we come to this? By looking at a large variety of client stats over the years we can plainly see that Google is consistently driving 70-75% of the organic (non-paid) traffic across a wide variety of different market types. We hypothesize that this difference is due to a higher percentage of clicks per search on Google vs Yahoo and Bing.
It has been long known that not all searches result in clicks. The best data we’ve seen is pretty old and was a release of data from AOL searches. This data of over a million searches showed that users only clicked on a link ~50% of the time. We strongly suspect the CTR (Click Through Rate) at Google (and Yahoo and Bing for that matter) is higher than 50% but, we also believe that the comScore numbers are misleading, because they only report searches, not CTR. Thus, while Google may be losing some gross market share, their effective market share, that is the market we all care about – actually driving users to our sites, is still dominated by Google.
Google still drives the vast majority of traffic and we don’t think that this is likely to change soon.
To quickly balance this discussion, while Google is the traffic king, we do find that traffic from Yahoo and Bing typically converts at a higher rate – but that’s a topic for another time.