|
Mountain View, California-based Google continues to be the search engine of choice over rival Web  search companies Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask.com, with figures released Friday by Web traffic analysis firm Nielsen Company showing that its search engine was used for 56.3 percent of all searches conducted in the United States during December 2007, more than tripling the 17.7 percent share of nearest rival Yahoo. Among some 6 million searches recorded by Nielsen during December, Google was responsible for over 4 million, while Yahoo users performed about 1.25 million searches, according to Friday's report. December 2007 Nielsen Figures The December 2007 MegaView Search report from Nielsen Online, whose parent company formed a television advertising partnership with Google in October, shows the top ten U.S. Web search providers based on the total number of searches Nielsen noted for each, the corresponding percentage shares, and the number of searches performed by each visitor on the sites. The figures are shown in the SearchEngineWorld chart below:   Microsoft Shows December Gain Microsoft's MSN Live Search site held the third position during December, with a 13.8 percent share of total searches, followed by Time Warner Inc.'s AOL with a 4.7 percent share and Ask.com in the fifth position with a 2.2 percent share. MSN Live search was the only firm among the top three to see an increase in its search share during December, showing a 1.8 percent increase over its 12 percent November figure, according to Nielsen. In November 2007 Microsoft began a program, called Live Search Rewards, which rewards people for using its search engine. The sixth most used search engine during December was My Web Search with a one percent search share, followed by the search products of Comcast, NexTag, AT&T Worldnet and BizRate, all of whom saw a 0.5 percent of less share. Number of Searches Information The Nielsen statistics show each person using Google during December conducting 37.9 searches and each Yahoo user performing 22.4 searches. While Yahoo held the second position in overall search share and number of searches during December, it was third in the number of searches per user rankings, behind Microsoft's MSN Live Search, whose users performed 31.7 searches during the month. Leader Google saw its share of the search market fall slightly from the 57.7 percent figure Nielsen recorded during November 2007, a drop of 1.4 percent and the first decrease it has seen since June 2007 when it saw a 3.6 percent downturn. In October 2007 Nielsen made several changes in its measurement process and urged against comparing the December figures with those from earlier months. The changes, which affected Nielsen's MegaPanel service and its corresponding monthly search engine rankings, affect overall accuracy and according to Nielsen, "include more granular reporting, increased accuracy, an expanded Internet universe and more advanced tracking." The Nielsen Online MegaView Search statistics were previously known as Nielsen NetRatings or Nielsen BuzzMetrics, according to the Friday statement. Google Tops Nielsen December U.S. Search Rankings Yahoo joined Google with a slight decline in overall search engine share, dropping 0.2 percent from 17.9 percent to 17.7 percent during a month that saw no change in the overall top search engine firm positions. Google maintains its sizable lead over the search engines in the second through ninth positions, whose Nielsen December 2007 searches when combined total 2.9 million, a figure that is still over 1.1 million searches behind the Mountain View firm. Related Links:
| 
10:22 pm on Jan. 21, 2008 (utc 0)