Google Runs Away from Yahoo and MSN in Search Share

The other day I wrote a post detailing the online revenues of the Web's big players, and although Google is still far and away the leader, it's interesting to see how much its revenue growth has slowed in the last year. But let's look at Google and its alleged search competitors from another vantage point, by looking at the raw number of searches performed on their services, and their overall share, as tallied for January by Nielsen Online (the figures were released yesterday):

Google currently has a 62.8 market share, showing YOY growth of 40.8 percent, off a base that last year was still three times as large in terms of number of searches as its closest competitor, Yahoo. Wow.

During the same period, troubled Yahoo, grew by 8.7 percent and currently has a 16.2 share, while Microsoft's MSN/Windows Live Search (which has aspirations of combining with Yahoo's search business, and maybe even AOL's), has an 11.2 share, though its YOY growth is 18.3 percent. The good news is that more people are searching than ever before. Last January, the U.S. population engaged in about 7.3 billion searches by my tally of Nielsen Online's numbers; this year that figure has jumped to almost 9.5 billion. Below, I've included Nielsen Online's tally from last year (the data does not include YOY growth between 2007 and 2008):

But the bad news, for both Yahoo and MSN, is that even as the two of them benefit from a larger pool of searches, Google is increasingly putting both of them in the rear-view mirror. Their share of the market actually declined, despite, particularly in the case of MSN, showing growth. It increased number of searches from almost 895 million to about 1.05 million, but saw its share shrink from 12.1 percent to 11.2 percent. Crunching the numbers another way, of the 2.2 billion additional searches that took place in the U.S. last year, Google got 1.7 billion of them. MSN got about 164 million, Yahoo 122 million.

Does this mean that it's not worth it for Yahoo and MSN to merge their search operations? No. There would still be advantages to being a bigger player going versus Google. But based on these numbers, it might have helped to do it a year ago, when they were in a somewhat better competitive position. If the two had combined last year, they would have gone up against Google with a 31.1 percent share of the market to Google's 56.9 percent. This January, their combined share is 27.4 percent to Google's 62.8 percent. If AOL joins the party, combined share would be 31.4 percent. A Google killer, that combination is not.