Number of Searches: Which search engine is most popular

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In the first decade of the 21st century a new staple in the lives of Internet browsers worldwide emerged – the search engine. Chances are that you arrived at this page from a search engine and, if you don’t like this article, it’ll be the next website that you’ll visit. So, which search engine is most popular?

Statistics confirm for the last two years that Google has been, by far, the most popular search engine according to the recorded number of searches per month (ComScore.com). Unless you have been hiding in a cave for the last decade, you would have already noticed Google’s dominance through new lingo- “Googling it” referring to searching for something through a search engine, or even realised that the colourful G icon in the top right of most popular web browsers is a built-in search function that is a shortcut to the Google search engine.

Google’s influence on everything “Internet related” has elevated their status as the leading search engine. However, specific statistics on the performance of the Google search engine is information that is harder to come by. The following are findings retrieved from comScore’s (www.comscore.com) U.S search engine rankings reports:

  • July 2007, Google was used in 55.2% of U.S search queries out of 9.9 billion total searches. This was compared to Yahoo’s 23.5% share of total searches, followed by Microsoft site’s 12.3% share.
  • In July 2007, Google processed 5.45 billion U.S searches. This equates to an average of approximately 176 million searches a day.
  • Google’s percentage of U.S total searches has been steadily rising since July 2007 at a rate of about 1% per month.
  • In May 2008, Google’s percentage of total U.S searches sits at 61.8% out of the total 10.8 billion searches.
  • In the month of May 2008, Google processed nearly 6.7 billion U.S searches. This is equal to approximately 214 million searches a day. An increase of 38 million search queries a day since July 2007.
  • From July 2007 to May 2008, Google has processed a total of 65.6 billion U.S searches. An average of 5.96 billion searches a month.
Coupled with recent blog posts concerning turmoil at Yahoo, Google’s biggest competitor, trends suggest that Google’s influence on the search engine market will only increase with time. However, in such a lucrative market it is inevitable that there is talk about alternatives to Google; in particular, one unlikely competitor – del.icio.us.
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