Booming Web Search Market - Google reign flourishes

The recent market analysis revealing the that the number of online searches across 60 search engines grew 55 percent year-over-year to nearly 5.1 billion in December 2005 against the  3.3 billion searches conducted via search engines in December 2004 has added another milestone to the evolution of online web search business reaching zenith.

At the same time   the number of people on the Internet in the U.S. rose only 3 percent to 207 million. The upcoming trends reveal search as the starting point of the majority users going online. As said by NetRatings analyst Ken Cassar "Whether it's out of laziness or ignorance, consumers' starting point is very much search."

Among the market leaders Google has once again proved its supremacy against its rivals Yahoo and MSN. Google was the only one to gain market share, rising 5.7 percent year-to-year to 48.8 percent. No. 2 Yahoo Inc., on the other hand, saw its market share dip by 0.3 percent to 21.4 percent, while Microsoft Corp.'s MSN experienced a 3.1 percent drop to 14 percent.

Searches on Google jumped 75 percent in the month to 2.5 billion, Yahoo 53 percent to 1.1 billion and MSN 20 percent to 553 million. Google’ success can be credited to its ace technology and search result relevancy provided to its users. Its aggressiveness towards penalizing sites that are questionable, focus on vanity searches, getting offline content in its index like digitizing library books is giving the search guru a lead in the Chinese market too after relishing huge success in the U.S markets.

"Baidu holds a clear lead in the Chinese market in terms of usage and brand recognition," said Dr. Bonny Brown, director of research and public services. "However, we see that Chinese consumers really like the overall Google experience better. Eventually, this promises to translate into increased market share, particularly given Google's strong resources and focus on the market."