Yahoo Search Engine Market Share - Noteworthy Change
I’ve promised this update to a few people. There’s been an interesting trend I’ve been watching since December 20, which I wanted to hold off on discussing until I had a longer timeframe to comment on.
I didn’t want to comment on a one week trend. I’ve got ~3 months of data since December 20 to work with, and now it’s time. You may remember from a previous post, we noted a strong jump in Yahoo’s market share around the date December 20.
We had seen other jumps in Yahoo’s market shares (and MSN’s) around major holidays, and attribute this to the type of user each search engine enjoys. Google users tend to spend less time searching online during major holidays. This may be because most home systems are configured differently from work systems, or it may reflect that students overwhelmingly favor Google (?); when breaks happen, they go home and spend their time catching with friends and family in person.
At some time in the future, we will provide some analysis showing search trend differences between users at work, and users at home. That will be interesting…
Here’s the data on Yahoo’s market share trend.
| Jan 1 - 15
Jan 16 - 31 Feb 1 - 14 Feb 14 - 28 Mar 1 - 15 |
14.49%
14.53% 15.44% 14.83% 13.80% |
So - Basically, around December 20, Yahoo’s search engine market share surged. It’s reached it’s peak in early February, and now seems to be subsiding. I’ll monitor it over the next few months, and will report on the trends.