Google Juggernaut Rolls on Except in Korea

Search engine giant Google just keeps getting more and more popular.

The latest figures from Hitwise, which tracks search market share, show Google with a record 66 percent share of Web searches in the United States for December 2007.

Google had just over 63 percent share for the same period a year ago, according to figures released on Tuesday 8^th January. Meanwhile, Yahoo!'s share dropped 0.7 percent to 20.9 percent, Microsoft's dropped 2.8 percent to just over 7 percent and Ask rose 0.3 percent to just over 4 percent. The remaining 49 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.71 percent of U.S. searches.

Percentage of U.S. Searches Among Leading Search Engine Providers

Note: Data is based on four week rolling periods (ending Dec. 29, 2007, Dec. 1, 2007 and Dec. 30, 2006) from the Hitwise sample of 10 million US Internet users.

* - includes executed searches on Live.com and MSN Search.

Source: Hitwise

In Korea, however, Google was recently ranked at less than 2% of the market while homegrown search engine Naver has more than 75%. Another Korean company, Daum.net, is ranked second with about 10% market share, according to recent figures.

One reason for Naver's popularity is that it can deliver more relevant search results for local users than Google can.

Hitwise also found that searchers are using the major search engines more frequently to locate sites and information for key industry categories. For instance, travel, entertainment, business and finance, and sports categories showed double-digit increases in the share of traffic coming from search engines.

U.S. Category Upstream Traffic from Search Engines and Google - December 2007

All figures are based on U.S. data from the Hitwise sample of 10 million Internet users.

Source: Hitwise

It will be interesting to see how long Google can hold onto its strangle-hold on the search engine market in the US and if there are any plans to develop Google for the Korean market to loosen the grip that Naver has. Let us know what you think.

Posted by Courtney Mills at 3:22 AM GMT