Hitwise Intelligence - Bill Tancer - North America

It is surprising that Yahoo has gotten so low in search shares over the years.....
Just a FEW years ago, they has a 40% Search Share.

According to these Stats, there is really not a major difference between Yahoo and MSN search.

But it is interesting, how popular their Yahoo News is relative to Google

This may be due to the clearly marked categories and define Search sources in a directory format

Posted by Search Engines WEB | May 19, 2006 06:47 PM

Not what I thought was the case at all. Given all the press coverage, I thought that GOOG's non-search products were doing great. This suggests the exact opposite - cool innovations, no real market traction. GMail is especially surprising - all the hype and only 3% fo the users? If I were Eric, Larry, and Sergey, I'd be really pissed - or embarassed - or both!

Posted by Bud Thompson | May 19, 2006 10:36 PM

So, who's 2, 3 and 4 in the "News" space?

Posted by RBA | May 19, 2006 11:58 PM

RBA,

#2 Weather Channel (we have weather sites in our news category) 5.59%
#3 MSNBC 3.96%
#4 CNN 3.95%

Posted by Bill Tancer | May 20, 2006 12:03 AM

Very cool. Does the Yahoo map include both the regular map and the beta application?

Posted by Ryan Stewart | May 20, 2006 02:29 AM

Myspace Mail 19.5%? Really?

Posted by Undertoad | May 20, 2006 03:13 AM

email services is the interesting space to watch out for, with MSN Hotmail Live can we expect some changes there?

Posted by nivid | May 20, 2006 03:42 AM

Great work!! I am surprised also as to how little google as penetrated so far based on properties such as gmail, news, maps, etc. I huess this just proves how much improvement and growth they have ahead of them.

Posted by Sean Burke | May 20, 2006 07:23 AM

Really Surprising to me

Posted by 8think.com | May 20, 2006 10:08 AM

Wtih regards to email, it's worth noting that Gmail has been around for only about 2 years, whereas Yahoo and Hotmail have been around closer to 10. Google may have also hurt themselves a little by making Gmail invite only for so long creating an artificial scarcity. Further, it came along at a time where e-mail has basically been replaced by IM, at least for non-business users.

On the whole though, it's not really surprising, for a couple of reasons. Google doesn't advertise their stuff on their front page (at least, very rarely do they), so non-geeks don't know it exists. Yahoo is more entrenched with a lot of users simply because it's been around longer and has never pretended to be anything but a portal, whereas people think "Google=search" and that's it.

The pattern that I see is that the older services tend to be more popular; it says to me that even though the cost of switching for a user is low, it's very rare that they do once they're used to something, no matter how innovative a newer product might be.

The one surprise to me is Google Maps - which is on Google's front page and does fit within the "Google=search" paradigm.

Posted by Eric | May 20, 2006 10:32 AM

no AOL mail, money, or News?

Posted by jason | May 20, 2006 10:46 AM

I am not completely surprised. As Eric says, gmail has been around for a very short time. Another reason could be that some people that use gmail still have a yahoo mail account for historical reasons. I know a lot of people who've started using gmail only in the past 3 months, so things will change.

Posted by Deepak | May 20, 2006 02:46 PM

Yahoo should offer free, its fee-based services like personals. That's a killer social networking tool that could be ad-supported and integrated into mail, messenger, and more.

Posted by Nigel | May 20, 2006 03:58 PM

Excellent post. Is this globally? It would be great to see an extended league table for the news category.

Posted by Antony Mayfield | May 21, 2006 07:49 AM

Antony,

The numbers in my post are for U.S. Internet users, we also have data for the U.K., Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore and New Zealand.

-Bill

Posted by Bill Tancer | May 21, 2006 08:21 AM

Thanks, Bill. This is extremely interesting.

Posted by TBone | May 21, 2006 09:07 PM

Very cool. Does the Yahoo map include both the regular map and the beta application?

Posted by Ryan Stewart | May 21, 2006 10:33 PM

Ryan,

Yes, Yahoo! Maps beta falls within the maps.yahoo.com domain, so it's counted.

-Bill

Posted by Bill Tancer | May 21, 2006 10:36 PM

I think Mapquest is so strong because many corporate Web sites use them for their "how to get to our offices" page.

This study shows that Google has more mindshare than marketshare.

In the CAD industry (computer aided design), the Google name is is suddenly being slipped into marketing conversations because of Google's recent purchase of SketchUp. The purchase has little impact on the industry, but the mindshare has its effect.

Posted by ralphg | May 22, 2006 11:24 AM

How did you measure the Google Earth metric. I don't visit the Google Earth site when I use Google Earth, as it is a standalone application. Does the 2% indicate that at any one time, 2% of map site visitors are downloading Google Earth?

Does that include people downloading from the SketchUp site? Does it include people looking for Google Earth content on the official Google Earth Community?

Posted by Stefan | May 22, 2006 12:58 PM

I think this Google Trends graph is more representative of the popularity of the maps mentioned.

Posted by Frank Taylor | May 22, 2006 03:06 PM

Frank, you've read my mind, look for a post later this afternoon, comparing search term data on the different mapping sites.

-Bill

Posted by Bill Tancer | May 22, 2006 03:18 PM

Before putting too much stake in these numbers, I'd be interested in learning the methodology for this research. Is this available anywhere?

Posted by Malin | May 23, 2006 05:49 PM

Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.

Posted by SmartBoy | May 23, 2006 05:53 PM

Malin,

Check out our methodology page here:

http://www.hitwise.com/products-services/how-we-do-it.php

the methodology movie is very helpful.

-Bill

Posted by Bill Tancer | May 23, 2006 05:56 PM

Thanks for the very impressive list. I have a few questions.

The categories listed account for 21% of all internet traffic. How are the top 3 competing in the rest of 79% of traffic?
- How about Google groups. Yahoo groups/MSN?
- How about Orkut, personals.yahoo.com etc?

If Google can monitize 6Billion last year with relatively small chunk of the total traffic (Google.com search is just less than 3.5% of all US internet traffic), which sector can google reach more to gather more revenue

Thanks for the methodology link. So I assume these are page views? How do you think it would change if we calculate in terms of unique visitors?

Thanks

Posted by Ram Mallika | May 23, 2006 10:16 PM

Hi,

My name is Amardeep Ashiyana. I think this list is very impressive list. We should know about google yahoo and MSN in details....

Thanks,
Amardeep
Ashiyana
www.emavens.com

Posted by Amardeep Ashiyana | May 25, 2006 08:47 AM

Wow!! I'm shocked to see Gmail with only 2.5% and more shocking with MySpace with 19%. Maybe because Gmail is still in BETA... :)

Posted by GoogleVoice | May 25, 2006 09:30 AM

Email addresses are "sticky" - people don't want to change it and notify their contacts. Plus, their old emails are still sitting in the Inbox and don't want to leave them there.

I think once Gmail comes up with "Import you Old Email" feature (and later, eventually come out of beta so that people don't need "invites" to sign-up), people will be more wiling to switch.

I prefer Gmail and use it as my primary email account. I LOVE the fact that there are no "ugly" ad taglines on the bottom of my emails (Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail add ugly ad taglines on the bottom of your email messages and they look very UNPROFESSIONAL).

Plus, they provide free POP and email forwarding for FREE.

Also, there are no invasive ads. The text ads are hardly noticeable unlike the flashy distracting ones that Yahoo! and Hotmail have on almost every page.

Plus, Yahoo! Mail Beta and Windows Live Mail is slow compared to Gmail. (Yes, I have tried using both and don't like them. I, especially, do not like Windows Live Mail's UI. It's "ugly".)

People don't know what they are missing. They should try Gmail.

Plus, Gmail is BRAND new and I'm sure they have something excellent planned somewhere.

-ILoveGmail

Posted by ILoveGmail | May 25, 2006 08:05 PM

I'm not surprised to see that Yahoo and MSN has the biggest market shares in email. There is two easy explanations for this: first, as it has already been said, those two services have been working for about ten years (I remember when Hotmail wasn't MSN property, long time ago...) and second, they have also a strong tendancy to copy most of gmail features, like more stockage (remember the panic when gmail was introduced with 1 gig ?) and RSS feed for Yahoo.

So, do Google have a problem penetrating the market ? I don't think so. Look how Google search has become the ultimate reference for web search. The phenomenom is so huge that we now say "to google" when we look to something. In fact, Google is developping an entire suite of reliable and - the most important- free web services that will soon cover every aspect of Internet. In Quebec, there is already a real estate company that's using google earth to sell houses.

Now, I don't want you to think that I've been paid to say this. However, I'm confident that the Google expansion is the beginning of an era of free web-based and PC-based (with goobuntu, a linux distro) programs that will be more efficient and reliable than those offered by Microsoft and Yahoo.

Posted by hugoprev | May 26, 2006 08:10 AM

Hi there - are these figures globally, us or uk?

Posted by tom | May 26, 2006 11:31 AM

Tom,

This post is based on U.S. data.

-Bill

Posted by Bill Tancer | May 26, 2006 11:34 AM

Thanks Bill, how does this change (especially search) in UK, Germany or France? I.e. what I am fascinated in is search truly global or do we see major variations in different markets?

Posted by Tom Andrews | May 26, 2006 05:27 PM

thxs for the info but could you do the same for the EU / lets say UKIE DE FR IT a.so/ would be great
~frank

Posted by frank fuchs | May 27, 2006 02:28 AM

Hi, just a quick question. I'm wondering if you're looking at hostnames only, and not paths such as /maps ? If a user went to www.google.com/maps for example, are you counting that user in addition to the people who went to maps.google.com? Or /news, /mail, /finance, etc.

Posted by Matt Cutts | May 28, 2006 03:18 PM

I thought gmail is much more popular, their spam protection rocks!
While the new yahoo mail interface is awful, too many bugs and spam goes unfiltered..

Posted by Mike | June 7, 2006 07:15 AM

Would be interesting to see how this stacks up now with the infection rates of Google Maps going through the roof. Do these figures take into account Google Mashups or only requests made directly to maps.google.com?

Posted by Keith | December 20, 2006 02:54 AM