Google grabs 48% market share in online searches

New York (NY) - Google remains the most popular search engine with Internet users in the U.S. The company counted more than twice the search requests than its nearest competitor Yahoo, Nielsen Netratings said today.

The 60 search engines monitored by the market research firm assisted in a total of 5.7 billion searches started by U.S. users in January of this year. The number represents an all-time high and a 39 percent increase from about 4.1 billion in January 2005.

"Web users are conducting more searches not because they can’t find what they’re looking for, but because search as a utility has become deeply ingrained into people’s everyday lives," said Ken Cassar, chief analyst at Nielsen Netratings.

The market research firm estimates that approximately 48.2% of all search requests were run through Google. Yahoo follows as a distant second with a share of 22.2% ; Microsoft rounds out the top-3 with 11.0%.

Neither search engine posted significant gains or losses in their market shares over the past 12 months. Google climbed by 1.1%, Yahoo increased 0.9% and MSN Search saw a slight decline of 1.8%, according to Nielsen Netratings. While the market shares did not shift much, each search engine processed significantly more search requests than in January of 2005.

Google’s number of searches increased by 42% from 1.9 billion to 2.7 billion, Yahoo gained 46% from 866 million to 1.3 billion and MSN saw a 20% growth from 523 million to 626 million.