Half the year has gone by and there have been some big changes in all the search engines. We went through some stuff like the panda update, which lost you some link juice from some quality sites and also various page rank updates during the year. Something that has not changed much (well, if you Google at least) is the search engine market search for 2011. Google remains the leader in this category as the table below will show you. N.B: These are the figures for the US market share only.
| Market Share 2011 | January | February | March | April | May | June | Average |
| 66.60% | 65.60% | 65.40% | 65.70% | 65.40% | 65.50% | 65.70% | |
| Yahoo | 16.00% | 16.10% | 16.10% | 15.70% | 15.90% | 15.90% | 15.95% |
| Microsoft | 12.00% | 13.10% | 13.60% | 13.90% | 14.10% | 14.10% | 13.47% |
| AOL | 1.90% | 1.70% | 1.70% | 1.60% | 1.50% | 1.50% | 1.65% |
| Ask | 3.50% | 3.40% | 3.20% | 3.10% | 3.00% | 2.90% | 3.18% |
Google has held a constant amount of the search engine market share during the year so far. They jump between 65 percent and 66 percent with the lowest being 65.40 percent in April and the highest being 66.60 percent in January. Google has been the leader for search engines for many years now and is the preferred search engine in many countries. The market share in other countries is much, much higher though. Like the United Kingdom for example, where it has 90.45 percent of the market share compared to second place of 3.97 percent of Bing.
Yahoo is still the biggest competition (if you can really call it that) for Google but they only own 15.00 percent of the market share for 2011. Over the last six months their market share has dropped by 0.10 percent which is not too bad if you compare it to Google’s drop over the same period. Yahoo is only performing well in the US though because in the UK it only holds three percent of the market share. This is mostly due to the fact that Yahoo’s home page is basically all about the US, and internet users in other countries might not want to see the latest US news pop up when they trying to search.
Microsoft sites are holding steady with 14.10 percent of the market share. This comprises all Microsoft sites, including the newbie Bing. Well, not so new anymore but the newest out of the lot in terms of search engines. Personally, I feel that Bing makes up most of that 14.1 percent that Microsoft holds. Websites that use the “Powered by Bing” search tool also contribute to the market share of Microsoft sites. This is, of course, used on the popular social media site Facebook, so one can only imagine how big it is going to get. In the UK, Bing already has a greater market share than Yahoo.
If we look at the overall change from January till June you can see that Microsoft has gone up by 2.10 percent, while the other two big names have dropped a bit. Experts predicted that Bing would be a big challenger for Google in the future but I am not sure if it is moving at the extreme pace that was expected. Not taking anything away from its good progress though, Bing still has a few years to catch up to Google’s level.
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That’s true google remains the leader, but after some years may be i believe that facebook will compete and strive to take this position as i have heard that facebook began testing new versions of Search with a small group of people. Based on the success of those tests, they are rolling out a new version of Search to everyone on the site.