Google Receives 64 Percent Of All U.S. Searches In August 2007
Google Search Market Share Increased Seven Percent Year-Over-Year — Hitwise, the leading online competitive intelligence service, today announced that Google accounted for 63.98 percent of all US searches in the four weeks ending September 1, 2007.
Context & Ripple Effects
The monthly share race has been running all year through comScore's rankings — its April U.S. search engine numbers and June update kept score on Google, Yahoo and Microsoft — while Hitwise's own June analysis credited Google's universal search rollout with feeding extra video and maps traffic into its properties.
This Hitwise reading sharpens that arc: Google at 63.98 percent of U.S. searches for the four weeks ending September 1, 2007, up seven percent year-over-year, with the syndicated pickup from Search Engine Land framing it as share favoring Google and Yahoo while Microsoft drops.
First-order effects
- Paid-search budgets concentrate further on Google: a near-two-thirds share of U.S. queries means advertisers chasing volume have fewer alternatives at scale, tightening auction pressure on Google's inventory.
- Microsoft's declining slice weakens the economics of its search business at exactly the moment Yahoo holds second place — both now compete for the residual third of the market rather than against Google head-on.
Second-order effects
- Advertisers and agencies will lean harder on the comScore-versus-Hitwise methodology gap when planning spend, since divergent monthly measurements of the same market directly affect how share shifts get priced into media plans.
- A widening gap gives Google leverage in adjacent distribution — consistent with the unconfirmed rumors circulating this week among Digitimes, GigaOm and CrunchGear sources about a Google-branded handset that would carry its search beyond the PC.
Third-order effects
- If the year-over-year drift continues, U.S. search hardens into a single-gatekeeper advertising market, raising the structural question regulators and publishers face about negotiating with one dominant intermediary.
- The rumored handset push, still unfinalized on OS, hardware and partners, points toward search share being contested less on the desktop web than on whatever device owns future query volume — an outcome the current numbers make more plausible but do not guarantee.
The trend: U.S. web search is consolidating around a single dominant intermediary whose share compounds through product bundling and, potentially, new device categories.