Is Google’s market share 70.6% or 80.4% or 64.9% or 66.1% or 78.2% or 77.8% or 76.7%?
The answer is: Yes …
… depending on which stats you believe. With a range of 65% on the low side and 80% on the high, there’s a pretty large gap in the numbers. So when clients ask how their monthly search engine traffic distribution compares to the average, which numbers should we compare them to? The ones that say Google, Yahoo and Bing have 65%, 19% and 9%, respectively, of the market, or the ones that say they have 80%, 9% and 9%?
So we thought we’d try to establish an “Internet Average” of the market. We took market share numbers from six different companies, added in our own numbers based on observations of sites we monitor, and came up with this table.
Granted, each company has a different universe of searches from which it draws, and uses different methods of calculating its numbers. So this certainly is not a scientific process. But we do think it strikes a happy medium from the low to the high across Internet statistics. And we think it provides a nice baseline to which folks can compare their own traffic numbers.
Here’s where we pulled the data:
- Experian Hitwise
- StatCounter Global Stats
- ComScore (via PC World)
- Nielsen Wire
- Group 3 Solutions Data
- Enquisite
- iCrossing (via search engine land)