Google Sees Biggest Search Traffic Drop Since 2009 As Yahoo Gains Ground

helix2301 writes: Google's grip on the Internet search market loosened in December, as the search engine saw its largest drop since 2009. That loss was Yahoo's gain, as the Marissa Mayer-helmed company added almost 2% from November to December to bring its market share back into double digits. Google's lead remains overwhelming, with just more than three-quarters of search, according to SatCounter Global Stats. Microsoft's Bing gained some momentum to take 12.5% of the market. Yahoo now has 10.4%. All other search engines combined to take 1.9%.

Comments

Thank the Mozilla Foundation

[DrunkenTerror]

Thank you Mozilla!

Re:Thank the Mozilla Foundation

[Shakrai]

Thank them? They changed the default search provider on all my existing Firefox profiles without my permission during the last update. I have about twelve different Firefox profiles for different things (-no-remote is your friend) and I was quite annoyed to have to change it back to my preferred setting on every single one of them. I don't begrudge them for the search deal, it was bound to happen with Google pushing Chrome so heavily, but leave the existing people alone, mmm'kay?

Duck Duck Go

[Snotnose]

I switched to ddg a year or two back because I thought google had too much information on me. Maybe 2-3 times a week I need to revert to a google search, but ddg is fine for 99% of my searches.

Re:Have you ever noticed that ...

[TheCycoONE]

Just case sensitivity and the ability to include symbols would be sufficiently disruptive for me.

Google Now

[Phil Urich]

Google is actually trying to do exactly this with Google Now; predictively presenting you with information you'd otherwise be searching for is simple yet fairly innovative, arguably, and they're positioning it as the next advance in search. One might argue about the philosophy or practicality of that, but they are at least explicitly trying to completely remake what a search engine/page is.

It's certainly noticed that I go up to my local university campus in the afternoon on a specific day every week (although it doesn't know why...yet) and when I pop open the Search app it already shows at the top result, before I even have the chance to enter a search for bus and train schedules, a set of routes and times for transit up to campus. There as sense in which that's all just an obvious outgrowth of networked data, so perhaps calling it "extra-ordinarily innovative" is a stretch, but it's definitely something new for a search engine, and at least for me (again, your mileage may vary, especially vis-a-vis privacy concerns) is very convenient.

If you had selected something...

[jopsen]

leave the existing people alone, mmm'kay?

If you had chosen a search engine it would have... Only the default changed.
IMO, I don't see a way to do this painlessly...

Either way, I've actually started using yahoo in Firefox, and barely notice the difference.

Safe Search is never 100% off now

[Phil Urich]

Turn off safe search?

Actually, back in December 2012 Google tweaked things so that SafeSearch is, to a limited degree, always on; unless you explicitly search for "pornographic" materials they will generally filter out such results. As a Google rep put it in a statement to the press,

We are not censoring any adult content, and want to show users exactly what they are looking for -- but we aim not to show sexually-explicit results unless a user is specifically searching for them.

Re:Have you ever noticed that ...

[Dutch Gun]

I couldn't disagree more. I remember pre-Google search days quite well, and it was awful. You ended up wading through page after page after page of irrelevant crap because those search engines simply ranked pages based only on their content, and it was stupidly easy to game. Tag clouds were a direct result of this. Google entered the field and made every other search engine obsolete almost overnight, because the damn thing actually worked. In fact, it worked so well that you were even pretty likely to get the result you wanted in the very first slot - thus, the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, which in other engines might as well have been labeled "I Feel Like I Might Have Won the Lottery".

Even today, I use Google, because every time I experiment with another search engine, the results simply aren't as good. With Google search, I nearly always find what I'm looking for right at the top of my search. It's unbelievably rare that I have to traverse to a second page.

BTW, in case you haven't noticed, Google search actually does a lot more than simply search now. It's allows you to find out a lot of basic facts without even leaving the search page. For instance, try typing in calories in an apple or dollars to yen. They even present those results to me before I finish typing.

I'm sure that Google is working on new ways to improve search... after all, it's what drives eyeballs to their advertisements, so they have a huge incentive to make it work better, faster, and more intuitively than anyone else. My guess is that searches will continue to be able to answer more detailed and specific questions that people have rather than only point them to pages that have the answers. What other innovations, who can say? But I think we're past the big "disruptive" search breakthroughs - that happened once, and it was Google inventing search that actually worked.