Hitwise, a search engine data analysis company, announced that Google’s Search Engine Market share increased to 64% of the US in March. The increase from 63.9% in February to 64.1% was small but it represented a continuing trend since Google’s market share was 58.3% in March of 2006.

Yahoo’s search share dropped to 21.3% and MSN’s market share dropped to 9.2%, witch each dropping 0.1% respectively.

Why does Search Market Share Matter?

While those numbers don’t seem very significant, all those searches add up. A 0.2% increase of search share in a market of 6.4 billion searches per month (as of March 2006) equates to 12.8 million additional searches per month.

Google’s revenues were $10.6 billion in 2006 and they had roughly 33 billion searches per year, so their revenue for every search is about $0.33.

Google Gains $4.3 Million Last Month for Nothing

If each new search is worth roughly $0.33 to Google, then 0.2% increase in market share is worth roughly $4.3 Million. And that’s money that goes almost directly to their bottom line. Everything in their search engines are automated so it takes almost no cost to increase revenues that much.

Now you can see why market share is so important to the major search engines. Every search is like free money to these companies and all those searches add up.

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