When you talk about dominance, numbers speak louder than pages of reports written. Google, the name itself recalls a Goliath in the search market game, and the latest numbers seal its reputation. The search giant shares a gargantuan 90.5% of the market share and an even mind boggling 98.29% mobile search market share.
The numbers leave very little for the remaining competitors in the arena, which include Yahoo, Bing and other less notable search providers. The numbers are as follows for others:
Yahoo: 3.91% search market share; 0.8% mobile search market share.
Microsoft Bing: 3.74% search market; 0.46% mobile search share
The graph explains a whole lot more than I can ever express: an absolute dominance of Google over everyone else. The data compiled by Pingdom takes both the non-mobile search and the mobile search shares, and the red bar isn’t the sum of the two.
What is there to learn for others here? First and foremost: you can’t beat Google, not now and not in the future. The reason for this superiority? Early adoption and emphasis on one category: search, you won’t find Google trying interactive pages, awesome background pictures, integrating all sorts of useless stuff on the main search page and making Google.com a destination/portal. That is exactly what people have loved about it, when they visit Google they are sure of doing what they are on the site for: search unlike Yahoo for once. I can’t even recall when I last visited Yahoo.com for anything. It is flooded with all sorts of crap and search is just one aspect of it.
All in all, Google and search are synonymous with one another and despite all sorts of [legal] troubles Google has been into, it has been the best with what it started off with: plain old search.
Jean-Baptiste Su is the technology columnist for L’Expansion, the leading business publication in France. He’s also the co-founder and editor of TechPulse 360, a blog at the crossroads of business and technology, exploring the innovation and companies defining the high-tech and clean-tech industries.
Jean-Baptiste started his journalistic career 18 years ago at IDG in France, first as reporter at InfoPC (PC World) and then senior editor at Le Monde Informatique (ComputerWorld). He later joined Decision Informatique, part of Groupe Tests (01 Informatique, 01net.com…) as senior editor, before heading to France’s financial daily newspaper La Tribune as its local Silicon Valley correspondent.
