Comments for Hitwise: Google Continues to Grow Market Share, Financial Search Up Big, Health Search Growth Slowing

Hitwise: Google Continues to Grow Market Share, Financial Search Up Big, Health Search Growth Slowing

2007-12-11T16:41:50Z

Web traffic analysts Hitwise released a report this morning claiming that Google's search market share has continued to grow and is now 65.1%, up 5% from November of last year. Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com were reported to be at 21%, 7% and 4% respectively, all down from last year and last month.

At least as interesting are the Hitwise numbers about percentage of traffic driven by search to sites in various categories. Health and Medical sites get 44% of their traffic from search engines, 29% from Google alone, says Hitwise. The lowest category for search traffic is Business and Financial sites, where only 17% of traffic is from search, 10% from Google. That category, though, is also the one seeing the biggest growth in search traffic - up 21% year over year, with Google's search traffic to these sites up a whopping 30%.

Entertainment and Travel both saw big growth in search traffic over the last year as well (see chart, click for full chart with additional columns), while Health and Medical and Shopping and Classifieds saw search traffic grow the least.

Take-aways for me are that the world of Business search optimization and ad buying must be going strong and Health and Medical are probably search-saturated. How else would you read this chart?

Comment from Jonathan Mendez on 2007-12-11

2007-12-11T19:13:20Z

Marshall,

Search volume and ad spend across the Business & Finance vertical has been pretty stable the past few years so this kind of leap likely lends itself to a special event.

I did a quick check on Google Trends at the keyword level for many "mortgage" and "subprime loan" terms and there are huge year/year spikes in both search volume and news items for most of them. These clicks likely ended up on Business and Finance sites.

I could be wrong, but that is my hypothesis.

Jonathan

Comment from Marshall Kirkpatrick on 2007-12-11

2007-12-11T19:23:49Z

Jonathan, that sounds like a pretty good explanation for at least some of the jump!

Comment from John on 2007-12-11

2007-12-11T20:27:30Z

Yahoo introduced their search assist tool which means people need to enter less searches to get the results they want. So they get less searches on their engine in volume and lose market share.