Yahoo (YHOO) wants to change your mind about its search engine. It wants you to know that it is better at helping you find things thanks features like its SearchAssist auto-complete keywords, safe searching filters, and Search Monkey add-ons. So it is launching a campaign with display ads like the one on the left for the Web and radio spots as well trying to paint Google’s (GOOG) search engine as an inferior product—a place where people go to get lost.
Of course, Yahoo’s market share numbers tell a different story. In the U.S., it’s share of query volume as measured by comScore declined about a point in August to 19.6 percent, while Google’s rose a point to 63 percent. And if you look at traffic to each search engine, In the U.S., Yahoo has been flat for a year (up 0.8 percent) with 76.1 million unique visitors in August, while Google is up 16.9 percent to 127.9 million uniques. (These numbers are just for their respective search engines). Worldwide, the gap is even bigger, with Google attracting a whopping 636 million unique visitors in August (up 31.7 percent), versus Yahoo’s 231 million (down 3.4 percent).
So can an advertising campaign change any of that? Search is not like a soft drink. People use the search engine that they think can do the best job in helping them find things. Now, maybe Google has brainwashed all of us to believe that it does indeed produce more relevant results. And in a blind taste-test, more people might choose Yahoo’s results. But if that is the case, I’d rather take an interactive quiz that puts each search engine to the test and make my own decision. That would go much farther to convince me to switch than Yahoo’s current creative.
This article has 4 comments:
- grishick
- 27 Comments
My Website
Oct 14 05:40 PM- monkeyman
- 4 Comments
Oct 14 06:30 PMHas anyone done the math on the number of FIrefox 3.0 downloads versus the number of increased hits for Google?
- Matt Lillig
- 8 Comments
My Website
Oct 14 11:43 PMThe data shows that the trend has been increasing of visitors who search for the term "yahoo" on Google.
mattlillig.blogspot.co...
By the way...Google share down and Yahoo share up for September....
blogs.barrons.com/tech...
- Noway
- 6 Comments
Oct 15 02:06 PMMonkeyman mentioned FF browser. Another huge increase is Google's deals with pc makers like Dell, which installs Google crap on new PC's and they're a little tricky to remove if you're not pc savvy.
Its similar to how MSN/IM/hotmail/IE is so popular around the world. they come default with the OS and 99% of the people don't bother to change them.