Search engine popularity - August 2006

The latest monthly figures from Comcast show that the number of searches online is growing at 3% a month, with users in the US carrying out 6.5 billion searches in August.  Of these, 44.1% were done on Google, a slight improvement from last month's drop. This seems to re-etablish the trend of increasing market share enjoyed by Google since the autumn of 2005.

Overall though the other main engines have lost 'share of search' to Google by a few percentage points over the last year as you can see in the table.

The figures come from a panel of 2 million consumers worldwide whose searches are tracked by Comscore. While their habits may be influenced by their knowledge of being watched, we think the trend is valid.

Significance

Searching is becoming more and more the ingrained in the habits of internet users. As the main search engines compete for users by offering better relevancy, convenience and tools, advertising on search engines or optimising webpages is an essential activity.