Search Engine Market Shuffles

The monthly number of internet searches in July 2005 reached an astounding 4.8 billion, a 22% increase over the number of searches conducted in July 2004. To the delight of Googles competition, Google lost a portion of its market share. ComScore Media Metrix reported that Googles market share dropped to 36.5% while both MSN and Yahoo improved. MSN saw the largest increase in search frequency in having 744 million domestic searches, a 30% increase over July 2004. As a result MSNs market share increased to 15.5%.

Yahoo ranked second with 30.5% of the market share. Yahoo Search also ranked as the most popular toolbar search choice, obtaining 51 percent of such searches. With a toolbar search option, a computer user can enter their search in a small window on their Web browser, regardless of what site they happen to be on, rather than having to go to a search Web site to run their query.

So, the most current market share figures I have are:
Google: 36.5%
Yahoo: 30.5%
MSN: 15.5%

One of the key questions that both Google and Yahoo will need to address is how do they defend themselves against Microsoft’s integrated search functionality release with Longhorn, which most likely, will continue to cut into the other two Search Engines’ territory. By next year, all three vendors would have desktop + toolbar + web searches, but Microsoft’s will likely be the most integrated.

If Microsoft goes up, then either Google or Yahoo will need to go down.

So what is Yahoo’s defense strategy?