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Google's Weekly Search Numbers

August 22, 2006

Danny Sullivan posted a very interesting piece yesterday on what the research services were reporting for Google's July market share of executed searches. We posted our July numbers the first week of this month indicating a healthy growth in executed searches (see them here). In light of Danny's post, we've compiled our weekly U.S. executed search numbers for the last four weeks to see if there has been a plateau in Google's searches.

executed searches weekly aug 06.PNG

In fact the numbers do indicate a slight decline in market share of executed searches for the first three weeks of August. However, I agree with Danny's caveat to wait for longer term trends before jumping to conclusions. While 60% may represent a saturation point for Google, it also may be a seasonal fluctuation. Let's take a look from a different angle, the chart below is daily U.S. market share of visits to Google's main domain www.google.com, the main source for Google searches:

google visits daily aug o6.png

As an aside, notice the marked increase in visits during the weekend of July 22nd and 23rd, that's the MySpace outage which is discussed here. There is however a downward trend in visits that corroborates the plateau in executed searches of the last several weeks. A review of the same time period last year, reveals a similar trough in visits, but during July 05 bolstering the theory that we may be witnessing a seasonal trend.

google visits daily aug 05.png