According to traffic analysts Hitwise, Google’s search market share in the US has risen to a whopping 70% in 2010.
The rest of the market is shared by Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com. With this rising trend for Google been noted significantly since 2008, traffic analysts have been discussing everywhere what makes Google the search market leader.
Innovation
Although most people argue today that Google’s approach to searches today is traditional and might get outdated soon, the statistics support an opposite view.
Google’s basic search functions might be traditional but that is what has made them click for the masses. It is still extremely easy to use for searching and provides easy-to-generate reports for PPC workers and SEOs.
There is a lot of opportunity thus for competitors to come up with a more innovative search experience but looking at current figures, competitor search engine companies will have to work a lot to beat Google in the market now.
Semantic Web
Concepts like geoRSS are the talk of the hour and Yahoo, only second to Google in the search market has already announced its working on the concept. What that would do to semantic web indexing is phenomenal.
Users will be able to search for very specific queries like book reviews in a specific part of the world written by a specific group of people, for example. Although most search engines might seem too laid-back to take this hard-working approach towards semantic web innovation, Google might follow suit.
Until Yahoo enables its search engine for this concept and makes competition interesting with Google, Google will remain the search market leader for sure.
Privacy
Initially, Google has been seen to be all up for user privacy and stressing on the importance of the relationship between users and the company.
Recently though, events have shown otherwise where misuse of user date by other users and by Google itself has come onto the scene.
With an initial public outcry and problems on a national level with some countries, analysts predicted a drop in market share for Google. It has however been growing since then too.
Although analysts may debate on and advocate the importance of privacy for users of Google or any service on the Web, users themselves feel otherwise, as shown by market trends.
Sharing of private data on social-networking websites has been rising exponentially over the years making room for behaviorally targeted advertisements. The same share of data has been seen in search terms on Google.
Today, users want to turn to Google to search for everything from self-diagnosing cancer to learning how to be a dominatrix in bed.
With users being completely okay with how they share their privacy online even after news of misuse of personal data, Google can be seen to be the search market leader for years to come.