Surprise… Google’s Still On Top

The Nielsen Corporation recently released its search engine market share numbers for December 2009. Were there any surprises? Let’s look:

Combine Google with AOL (same results) and you can see that their algorithm serves up nearly 70% of all search results online. This really isn’t shocking, but the decline of Yahoo! is clear; they formerly served upwards of 25% of all search results. Now? They’re lucky to get near fifteen percent. Bing.com (aka Live.com, aka MSN.com) is still hanging in there with just under 10% of searches. One would have thought all of their marketing spend would have moved that needle more…

Validating the summary above is the December 2008 Nielsen chart:

As you can see, both Google and Bing have grown their market share by a fraction of a percent but Yahoo! has seen a more serious decline. There are no surprises here but attorneys and/or lawyer marketing professionals can take away a few ideas:

1. Google is still dominant and will usually be the source of your search engine traffic. You’re right to use Google to judge the overall optimization of your site.
2. Yahoo is on its last leg… While you can still find some good PPC values within Yahoo search and top SEO keywords will yield traffic, consumers are abandoning that search engine in a continuing stream.
3. Pay attention to Bing in 2010 but their rankings will likely fluctuate frequently. (I find bad search results quite often.) If you feel like getting to know Bing better, try their PPC program.

Thanks to the folks over at SearchEngineWatch for calling out this newly-issued data.

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