Google Leads in Global Search, But Rivals Are on Radar

On Wednesday, comScore released its first-ever worldwide search patterns report, which indicates that while Google remains the go-to search engine for most users in the world, China's Baidu.com and South Korea's NHN Corp. have managed to crack the top five. The comScore qSearch 2.0 service shows that over 37.1 billion searches went through Google in August, representing about 60% of all searches. That figure beat Google's 50% U.S. result for that month. Yahoo was a distant second with 8.5 billion, followed by Baidu with 3.3 billion, Microsoft with 2.2 billion and NHN with 2 billion. Though the figures offer what Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, calls "an extremely rough guide" to the state of the industry, they are not believed to provide a financial picture. "This is a data set that investors understand has its useful purpose, and predicting quarterly (financial) results is not its useful purpose," said Rob Sanderson of American Technology Research. Still, comScore's new computational method "more accurately measures search traffic sources that are core to customer engagement and enables advertisers to get the most out of search," according to Brad Goldberg, general manager of search marketing at Microsoft’s search unit.

Sources: comScore press release, AP, ZDNet, Barron's, News.com.au
Commentary: Back-to-School Lifts September Search Volume • Google Hits All-Time High on Continued Search Gains, Analyst Notes • Baidu: Beware Downside Risk
Stocks/ETFs to watch: GOOG, BIDU, YHOO, MSFT. ETFs: HHH, FDN
Earnings call transcript: Baidu.com Q2 2007, Google Q2 2007, Microsoft F4Q07, Yahoo! Q2 2007

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Comments

[GRiddick:]

Good morning, Judith

I think I represent a minority of folks out here who have an entirely different view of Google than you, and most other financial journalists and analysts, I follow these days.

You see, you continue to report on all the phenomenal upside of this thing they call "google" ... yet you completely ignore the more predictable downside. This misleads investors in my view, and leads to the type of things that happened back in 2000.

The little old ladies in Omaha end up holding the bag.

Google, for years, has written its own rules. Its rocket scientists invented a new moral compass owned and operated exclusively by a select few inside Google .. and several of their lawyers, investment bankers, and venture capitalist friends as well.

They rob from the middle class and give to the poor ... and others in the middle class .. and to the rich ... and to themselves. Over and over again. Google is one of the most flagrant copyright infringers on the planet. Day in and day out ... millions of times a day ... every day.

Not everyone plans to sell out and settle with Google, as they apparently see all of this "shaking out". Wait and see.

And if you don't think a misguided moral compass, unethical business practices, corporate arrogance, hypocrisy, and greed can bring down someone as mighty as Google, you might want to think again.
Can you spell ENRON?

Judith, I would never make such a claim without substantial proof of what I say. I'd be happy to review our research, and our extensive documentation, with you in more detail if you ever decide to tell your readers the flip side of the Google story. The true side.

George P. Riddick, III
Chairman/CEO
Imageline, Inc.

[e-mail]...

2007 Oct 11 11:26 AM

[PC&G:]

No one company should dominate in my opinion, but at the same time I have to applaud creativity and ingenuity over....the opposite of that. I will have to say I have used Naver regularly (used to live in South Korea) and it is phenomenal, it was doing what Google is doing today 5 years ago. If Naver were an American company and operated in English (still the language of the web) Google would be nothing today. As for Yahoo!, maybe they should take that advice last week from Bernstein and outsource their searches to Google (cool article on that www.newsvisual.com/new... ). Microsoft, maybe they should stick with more Halo games.

2007 Oct 11 05:29 PM