This article comes from MediaPost by Rob Garner , Wednesday, March 17, 2010
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The bottom line is that we see Google as generally a higher referrer to enterprise sites, and while Yahoo and Bing are significantly lower in terms of overall share, the gap between the two is narrowing at a quick pace.
The chart below presents enterprise search share performance in views of both year-over-year, as well as month-over-month.
Google hits 80% market share for enterprise level businesses
Google increased month-over-month to command an 80.17 % natural search traffic share to enterprise-level Web sites, while Bing share increased slightly from January to February by 0.09%, to 7.16% overall. Yahoo decreased to a 9.34% share, losing 2.9% search market share year-over-year.
AOL declined in share year-over-year, from 1.95 % in February 2009, down to 1.49 % market share in February 2010. AOL share remained stable month-over-month. Ask.com’s search market share increased slightly in month-over-month share by 0.01%, going from 0.37% up to 0.39 %.
In the month-over-month view, again only Bing and Google made any significant gain in market share. AOL and Ask.com somewhat surprisingly leveled off month-over-month.
Bing making an impact, and preparing to overtake Yahoo
Overall, Bing’s gain in share has had the greatest impact on both Yahoo and AOL. While Yahoo’s loss of almost 3% of the search market is significant, AOL search users are migrating elsewhere, with AOL losing almost 25% of the entire search business. That 0.45 % loss in search market share is a blink and blip for Google, but a much bigger chunk for AOL.
I’ve also been monitoring trend data in the search share race, particularly what I believe to be the inevitable catch-up in market share for Bing (against Yahoo). Based on current trends, we see them overtaking Yahoo later this year, possibly even before there is any kind of direct syndication of Bing results into Yahoo properties.
