April Online Search: Yahoo Gains, Outpaces Google

No one likes a one horse race. So with that in mind I’m pleased to report that in April, according to Compete data, Yahoo! (YHOO) search share increased a little over half a point as a result of 5% month-over-month gain in total US consumer query volume. Unfortunately Yahoo! has a long way to go to get back to year ago levels of market share.

Of course Google (GOOG) didn’t exactly sit still. For the first time, Google crossed over the 66% mark with US online consumers using Google for nearly two-thirds of their web search queries. Month-over-month, Google’s query volume increased about 4%, slightly lagging the gains of Yahoo! Hey it’s hard to be the biggest and the fastest every time.

Among the other guys at the top of the heap, Ask held relatively steady and MSN/Live (MSFT) and AOL (TWX) dipped lower. MSN/Live and AOL dipped to their lowest market share levels in a over a year. With AOL dropping into the 1ppt range it may be time to start thinking about pulling some other engines into our “top engines” group.

So, going back to my math roots again … if Yahoo! continues to grow at 5% every month and Google continues to grow at 4% every month, how long would it take Yahoo! to overtake Google? About 8 years. Of course this scenario will require consumers to submit nearly a half a trillion queries a month. That’s over roughly 40 queries a day for every man, woman, and child in US … just about the same number of monthly queries we pose right now. If it’s that hard to find stuff on the web in 8 years … we really screwed up.

* Search market share includes web search only and is calculated based on unique queries within each session during the given month.

Where do Compete's traffic numbers come from?

Comments

[Andrew Melcher]

As mark Twain said, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."

According to the statistics above, the market share pie for search engines changed as followed:
Google added 1.4% of the entire pie
Yahoo added 0.7% of the entire pie
AOL, MSN, and ASK collectively lost 2.1% of the entire pie.

Yahoo only outpaced Google because it is slightly less than 1/3 of Google's size and it picked up exactly 1/3 of of the business lost by AOL, MSN, and ASK as they implode. And Yahoo's out-performance is only for the month of April. Over the preceding November, December, January, February, and March, Yahoo lost over 20% of its business to Google.

How does Jeremy justify a headline that suggests a horse race? Yahoo's green market share trend line on the graph above clearly shows Google creaming Yahoo. A more accurate title would be, "April online search: Yahoo finally eeks out a gain."

Also, Jeremy extrapolated from a one month trend. -- A meek one month reversal on Yahoo's staggering 25% market share losses over the past year. From one month's statistics, Jeremy implies that the trend has reversed and that Yahoo will eventually overtake Google. This extrapolation is unbelievable and sensationalistic and not worthy of being on Seeking alpha.


*I think this post is deceptive and should be deleted by the admin.*