JonesPC

I love Google, have used them exclusively for a few years now. Google gets lots of hype. All of the tech sites talk about them, all of the Podcaster adore them, they are in the news enough to where you may think, like I did, that they were the number one search engine. I never even thought to look it up, but while browsing around Alexa earlier when I was checking out my info, I decided to take a look to see who the top sites were. Low and behold, the number one site was none other than…….

YAHOO!!!

Then I thought about it. Most people I have come across that wasn’t a techie (which is most people) has had Yahoo as their homepage. If it wasn’t Yahoo, it was MSN. I can understand MSN because most windows users have MSN as their default search engine when they first buy their computers, and a lot of them never change it. But I was surprised to see that Google hadn’t taken over yet.

The above chart is the Alexa ranking for Yahoo, MSN, Google, and Live.com over the last 3 years. If you look, Yahoo has pretty much been in the lead the whole time. There are 2 small time frames where Google dipped ahead in 2006. Thinking back, I would say that dip in early 2006 was when Google bought Youtube and people looking for info on the deal. The one in late 2006 I cant think of what was going on that would cause that, I would guess it still had something to do with the Youtube purchase, maybe a resurgence of people looking for news. But from this chart, it looks like Google has definitely closed the gap but not yet taken over.

Another interesting thing is MSN. Up until 2006, MSN had a secure second place on this chart, but then dipped below Google. Check out what happens in 2007. MSN jumped to first place for most of the year so far. Im guessing the Vista launch has a lot to do with that. As you get closer to July, MSN drops off pretty rapidly, to where they are now going neck and neck with Google. Which is why I added Live.com in the mix. At that same time where MSN is dropping, Live.com is slowly gaining. Which is surprising because that would mean that a lot of people are choosing to use Live.com, and it isn’t just the search engine that is there when they bought their PC. (Live.com is also Microsoft search).

Does this mean that Live.com is creeping up to eventually take that number 1 spot? is Google stuck where they are? What about Yahoo, I’m guessing that they aren’t doing as bad as you would think…well obviously they aren’t. I’m going to have to keep a check on this, it seems pretty interesting.