It must be said that Yahoo search has never been quite as popular or as glamorous as Google; in fact I find comparing Yahoo and Google brings to mind a typical “teen movie” scenario where the shy, mousy girl with braces feels she can never compete with the pretty, spoiled cheerleader who seems to get all the attention. Of course the turning point usually comes when the mousy girl gets a confidence-boosting makeover, and the recent Yahoo search enhancements may be a step towards the search engine’s very own “Cinderella story”.

Recent Google search updates, from the rollout of Instant to the updated AdWords interface, have been causing a stir in many a SEO agency in recent weeks. With Google at the forefront of search innovation, it’s not surprising that rival engine Yahoo has started devising some strategic search enhancements as well.

A lot has changed since our last blog on the market share statistics in the search engine and social media industries. Twitter yesterday reached 50 million tweets a day, Facebook is just getting bigger and bigger and Bing is fast making and impression on the search engine market. Let’s take a look at some of the stats courtesy of Hitwise.

Search Engines:

First of all, let’s take a look at the UK search engine ranking report and compare it to last year’s report:

As you can see in the above search engine comparison, Bing didn’t even feature in the April 2009 report and now they are 3^rd behind Google. The Bing search engine most likely wont be ever be able to take on Google’s search engine, not in the foreseeable future anyway, but they certainly are making their presence felt. Yahoo on the other hand have dropped down one position even though they have remained steady as far as market share goes. Ask have dropped out of the top 5.

Everybody in the computer/internet industry has different preferences regarding what sites to visit, which search engine to use and what social network is the best for advertising business. Search engines and social media sites have been competing with each other for years now, and 2009 is sure to be exciting with millions more people getting in on the internet action, especially with sites like Twitter hitting the scene. I would like to cover which sites are the real big boys and which ones have still got a long way to go.

Keeping in line with our weekly SEO/SEM internal presentations that are done on Fridays (started by Sandy last week with a presentation on the future of mobile search); I demonstrated the similarities and differences between the three major search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Throughout the 2008 stats that I gathered from various search market share information suppliers, Google came out on top – globally they dominate the market with a share of 81% (77% in 2007). They are clearly undisputed winners in the race to gain the biggest market share in the search engine industry. Yahoo sits with 10.5% (12.5% in 2007) of the global market share, while MSN sits with 3% (3.3% in 2007). While the other two, less significant, engines continue to lose market share, Google gains further strength and supremacy each day.

Stats reveal that 1 in every 7 UK searchers chooses to use the “Pages from the UK” option within Google. This isn`t surprising considering that local search is becoming more popular and the main reason for this? When searching locally to find products or a service, there is more chance of you receiving results that are more relevant and accessible to you.

Stats also show that the most used search engine in the UK is Google.co.uk with 73% (stats taken on the volume of searches for the 4 weeks ending March 29, 2008 by HitwiseUK). Robin Goads writes in his blog that about 13.6 per cent of the users in the United Kingdom search for UK pages only. This means if Google had to create a search engine that only featured Google UK pages from Britain it would be the 3rd largest search engine in Britain, beaten only by Google.co.uk and Google.com.