Market Share Suggests the Strength of the Google Grip

August 24, 2011

Grab your Community Chest Card and move over Park Place, it seems Google has decided to take up residency. Rumblings of antitrust violations by the search giant are getting louder and blogger Gabriel Weinberg wants to know “What is Google’s Real Market Share in the U.S.?”. He suspects that the numbers being reported may not be telling us the whole story.

Comscore and Hitwise, which are Internet marketing research organizations, report that Google’s share is around 65 percent in the United States. However, there are contradictory higher percentages out there that are hard to explain. Weinberg says that 65 percent:

seems high indeed, but everyone I talk to ‘in the wild’ who runs high traffic sites actually sees a much higher percentage of their search engine traffic coming from Google, usually from 80-90%. There is some similar data on Quora and HN for reference. If you check those out, you’ll see some people (including myself) have seen some sites with less Google % and higher Bing or Yahoo, but these seem isolated cases on particular verticals (and overall smaller traffic sites).

The percentage discrepancy may have to do with counting internal links on Microsoft/Yahoo sites or that they are sending a lot of traffic to a small number of sites. However, there is no clear evidence that either scenario is affecting the numbers.

This leads me to ask – what percent makes Google a monopoly? Have they become the only company on the web? Though there will be many heated debates arguing both sides it looks to me that history is repeating itself. Google is starting to smell a whole lot like the Microsoft of the 1990’s. I expect the Department of Justice to take a long look at them especially with their most recent acquisition of Motorola (see: Google to Acquire Motorola Mobility). I wouldn’t be surprised if the government makes them move out of that Park Place neighborhood!

Jennifer Wensink August 24, 2011

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.