Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Online Marketing Consultant

According to recent comScore data, Google owns 45% of the search market and Yahoo has 28%. The bloodletting is still happening at MSN, who are still continuing to have their gargantuan slide into oblivion in terms of search traffic and user base. Until they learn that reliable and relevant search results are the key to internet traffic this will continue, or they lay down some real money ala New York Yankees style to buy up the best talent. It makes sense to me to spend a few dollars on employees and take back search instead of arguing over nickels and dimes and having Google snatch up the best talent. Although, I’m not in the board room at Google or Microsoft, so these are just assumptions.
One interesting tidbit:

Americans conducted 6.8 billion searches online in October, up 3 percent versus September. Annual growth rates in search query volume remained strong with a 33-percent increase versus year ago.

So search volume increased over 33% from last year. Very impressive! I can only wonder what will happen when Vista is launched in January and a bunch of new PC’s are online 24 hours a day and every time a user searches, it’s dumped through live.com or msn.com. Should be interesting to watch and might be the extra kick in the butt MSN needs to win back some market share from the big boys.

One final note, I can only imagine what is going on at Ask.com and their marketing department.

Marketing Guy: “Why haven’t our multi-billion dollar campaigns worked to bring traffic to us? We tell everyone our search engine returns better results and is easier to use.”

Tech Guy: “Have you looked at Google’s interface? One form and a button? Tough to beat that one.”