Google gains search market share at the expense of Yahoo and Microsoft

Google is extending its dominance in search like no other. Google grew its share of queries in April at the expense of Yahoo and Microsoft, the world No.2 and 3 in search market respectively.

Google’s U.S. search query share (April) grew to 61.6 percent, up from 59.8 percent in March, according to data by comScore (comScore is a traffic metrics company). Consequently, competitiors have seen decline in their market share.

Yahoo’s market share of queries dropped to 20.4 percent, and its number of queries fell 6 percent. Microsoft’s market share shrunk to 9.1 percent, while its queries fell 5 percent. AOL, down to a 4.6 percent share, saw its queries drop by 6 percent. Ask.com, whose share slid to 4.3 percent, had the biggest fall in queries percentage-wise with 9 percent.

Yahoo-Microsoft-Google: The Search Market angle

Microsoft + Yahoo = Not a good idea even for Microsoft (Photo by Gnal)

One of Microsoft’s targets to be met by acquiring Yahoo was to capture the booming search advertising market that is currently dominated by Google AdWords. With Google increasing their lead over rivals, it seems like a good decision to have not acquired Yahoo. Perhaps it is time Microsoft and Yahoo stopped pursuing search and advertising market – Google capitalized early, and has built impressive systems in both search and search-related advertising.

Yahoo has media and socializing sites like Flickr, Del.icio.us and to a lesser extent, MyBlogLog under its belt. They might embrace the true web 2.0 culture of modern websites, applications and sharing. We can dream, can’t we?

Microsoft, meanwhile, doesn’t have too many online assets, and those that they started are folding down and coming down faster than a pack of cards (example).

The most worry-some aspect is that Google is continuing its dominance and piling on revenues. Generally, a company gets complacent and sulky when it is the market leader (just ask Microsoft of the 1990s, when they ruled the computer OS market), and begins to produce poor applications and schemes and generally evil plans. While Google continues to innovate in some ways (some of the most exciting beta Google applications like Reader, Notebook and Docs&Spreadsheets have emerged from Google Labs), it might not be so for long. Here’s hoping that the good times not-so-bad times continue.