Google Market Share of Search Increases in December of 2008.

Thirteen years ago, the most popular search engine was AltaVista and the most popular directory was Yahoo. In the interim, some of the other popular search engines like MetaCrawler and Excite disappeared and/or were reborn. Just like any other relatively new industry, the search engine industry has experienced a tremendous amount of consolidation.

Yahoo now owns AltaVista, All the Web, and Overture, (renamed a few years ago as Yahoo Search Marketing Solutions). MSN was using Yahoo’s Search Marketing to provide their “sponsored” results but they started their own per click division a few years ago. Google’s pay-for-placement service is called AdWords. Which search engines are most popular today? According to Comscore.com in December of 2008 the popularity break down for the top five search engines were as follows

Google Sites – 63.5%

Yahoo! Sites – 20.4%

Microsoft Sites -8.3%

Ask Network – 4.0%

AOL – 3.8%

Each of the major search engines uses a pay-for-placement model along with a free (organic) search component. When your search yields items called “sponsored results,” those are companies paying for those search terms. As you can see, more people use Google than any other search engine. Users evidently prefer Google because they consider Google’s results more relevant to their search objectives. Relevancy can be a matter of commercialization. As companies agree to pay more for top search results, the consumer’s typical search may turn up fewer and fewer companies to choose from, as a direct consequence of the expanding budgets going to pay-for-placement.

Regardless of which search engine you choose, your top concern as a consumer is to get the most relevant results. While continued commercialization of search engines is inevitable, ultimately the consumer determines future trends.