

Google Loses Most US Search Share Since 2009 While Yahoo Gains - sanxiyn
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2015-01-07/google-loses-most-u-s-search-share-since-2009-while-yahoo-gains.html

======
Animats
Yes, choice of search engine is mostly by default. Most Bing searches come
from Microsoft products where Bing is the default. One would think that
Mozilla users would turn off Yahoo search immediately, but apparently some do
not.

Yahoo doesn't really have a search engine, and hasn't for five years. They
resell Bing and add some in-house content. The only reason to search with
Yahoo is if you want their in-house content.

Bing is currently more literal-minded than Google. Google is using too much
popularity-based machine learning to "correct" what you're searching for. It's
become difficult on Google to search for a non-popular thing that happens to
be close to a popular search target. Google does not treat quote marks as a
mandatory exact match any more, just a hint.

Running a search engine is so profitable that even the little guys with < 1%
market share make money - Ask, InfoSeek, DuckDuckGo, and Blekko are all
profitable. (Cuil blew it - no revenue model.) The most valuable ads on the
Internet are the ones on search results, because they appear when someone is
actively seeking something. Almost all other ads are interruptions. The only
thing that keeps the phone vendors and carriers from entering the search
engine business is huge payments from Apple, Google, and Bing.

Microsoft's current approach to Bing is unusual. Bing used to have its own
CEO; the last one was Satya Nadella, who is now CEO of Microsoft. Now, various
parts of Bing are under five different Microsoft VPs who also have other
responsibilities. Some people speculated that this was in preparation for
closing down or selling off Bing, but that doesn't seem to be happening.
Anyone know more about that?

~~~
Andrenid
> Google is using too much popularity-based machine learning to "correct" what
> you're searching for. It's become difficult on Google to search for a non-
> popular thing that happens to be close to a popular search target.

This has been getting me lots lately. It used to be 1 attempt, maybe 2, to
find what I'm after.. lately I find myself regularly needing to try >4
different searches before getting what I'm after. I've consciously noticed
that Google seems to have lost the whole thing that made them so great in the
first place.

~~~
nostrademons
Try verbatim mode, available under Search Tools -> All Results -> Verbatim or
by adding &tbs=li:1 to the URL.

~~~
bhrgunatha
Project Mycroft has hundreds of configuration files for browser search
plugins, including Google verbatim.

[http://mycroftproject.com/search-
engines.html?name=google+ve...](http://mycroftproject.com/search-
engines.html?name=google+verbatim)

------
petecooper
I'm a mobile computer technician in rural north Cornwall, UK. My clients are
domestic and small biz (5 or fewer employees).

One of the things that surprised me was the approach to search that my non-
technical clients take. Anecdotally, around half use Bing because they like
Internet Explorer. Curiously, more than two thirds of these folks also have
Chrome installed, so they can use Google; the misconception is that they
_need_ Chrome in order to use Google _anything_. Chrome is use for Google, and
nothing else.

I don't recall a single person using Yahoo! across 300+ home and small office
visits. Firefox is rarely seen, and if it does crop up it's usually because of
a years-old recommendation from a trusted family member.

~~~
rockdoe
_the misconception is that they _need_ Chrome in order to use Google
_anything_. Chrome is use for Google, and nothing else._

Misconception?

~~~
petecooper
These clients think that Google Chrome is the one tool to use for Google
services; that is to say, if you want to access Gmail, Google search, Google
whatever, they must use Google Chrome to do it. Internet Explorer isn't to be
used for that kind of thing. They consider Chrome to be an app to do purely
Google things, and use IT for everything else.

~~~
Terr_
I interpreted rockdoe's comment as:

"A misconception implies it's accidental, but it's partly deliberate: Google
wants to leverage their search-engine influence, convincing people they have
no choice but to buy into a larger Google-Stuff ecosystem."

~~~
rockdoe
I was referring to the fact that many Google sites offer a subpar experience
if you're not visiting them with Google's own browser, yes. So it's not a
misconception, those people are right that they're better of using Google
Chrome for the Google Internet.

------
blueskin_
The main problem with google is that it's too 'smart' for its own good (smart
tool makes stupid users). If I search for something, I don't want it to by
default include a massive list of other 'helpful' things up to and including
antonyms or different word order that changes the meaning (e.g. how "foo guide
for bar users" == "bar guide for foo users" according to google). Google has
been getting dumber ever since it stopped supporting + and "".

Similarly, although most search engines (except DuckDuckGo) filter bubble
people, it is by far the most pervasive and irritating with google. So far,
every single person I have explained filter bubbles to has been weirded out by
the idea and thanked me for telling them about it.

Of course, the other reason Google loses ground is privacy - Yahoo is
definitely not good on privacy, but at least they fought as hard as they could
before their hand was forced where google capitulated immediately. I can't
wait until in a year or two DuckDuckGo is as good as google (not as hard as it
used to be)...

~~~
dragonwriter
> The main problem with google is that it's too 'smart' for its own good
> (smart tool makes stupid users).

I don't think that's true; one, I don't think that Google's smarts are a
problem with Google, and two, I don't think that allowing people to direct
their intelligence other places than carefully crafting search queries to get
useful results in most cases makes stupid users.

> If I search for something, I don't want it to by default include a massive
> list of other 'helpful' things up to and including antonyms or different
> word order that changes the meaning (e.g. how "foo guide for bar users" ==
> "bar guide for foo users" according to google).

Altered word order in a query isn't equivalent to Google. I just tested with a
bunch of pairs that differed in order, and got different results for each
search in the pair.

Altered word order may be something Google things _may_ be relevant to your
search, but that's different than the equation you presented.

> So far, every single person I have explained filter bubbles to has been
> weirded out by the idea and thanked me for telling them about it.

Its possible to explain anything to people in a way that weirds people out,
but I don't see why search personalization should. Most people, I think,
understand that the same set of words from different people have different
most-likely meanings: if you know one person is a cocaine addict and another
is, to the best of your knowledge, drug-free but a heavy soda drinker, and
each says to you "I need some coke!", you'll probably interpret those
statements differently.

~~~
saalweachter
One thing I used to do quite a bit was go to a lot of shopping search sites
(Amazon, The Find, Shopzilla, Nextag, Shopwiki...) and try some pathological
queries to see who was doing stupid search and who was doing smart search. My
favorite test queries where [apples to apples], [dress shirt], [shirt dress],
and [+++++].

------
prlambert
This isn't really much of a surprise, it was virtually guaranteed by the
Firefox deal. As the article says, "I doubt Google needs to worry. For one,
that’s probably the high water mark".

Low-water mark (in terms of market share for Google) would probably be a
better phrase, but the point is that unless Firefox grows a lot (which seems
unlikely) the damage to Google is done.

~~~
SG-
More damage could be done if Yahoo worked a deal with Apple to change the
default search engine.

At the end of the day tho it's all about money and Google has more of it.

~~~
mattmanser
How is it about money?

~~~
mburns
Google pays Apple to be the default search provider.

~~~
72deluxe
Bing is the default Spotlight and Safari search in Yosemite. I can find no way
of changing it back to Google for Spotlight, which is incredibly irritating as
I find the Bing results useless.

~~~
denzil_correa
The web search feature in Spotlight is equivalent to the search engine of your
default browser.

~~~
72deluxe
I don't think it is - the search engine option in Safari does not affect
Spotlight. Spotlight is hardcoded.

------
BorisMelnik
Let's not forget this little metric: mobile. These stats were taken from
Statcounter which is not a comprehensive representation of the marketshare.

[http://i.imgur.com/aOXsraC.png](http://i.imgur.com/aOXsraC.png)

According to the same data, Google owns 87% of the mobile market, and I
venture to guess that number is actually higher and will continue to climb in
2015 as mobile will continue to dominate the consumer market.

~~~
bad_user
The importance of mobile marketshare is overblown. People aren't searching for
things to buy on their mobile phones, the searches themselves being very
superficial, the attention span being lower. As a result conversion rates and
CPC is much lower on mobile.

I also believe that this post-PC era has been nothing but bullshit. Yes, PC
sales have been declining, but that's only because people stopped feeling the
need to upgrade. And yes, mobile phones are here to stay, with their numbers
rising and their utility growing, but if you take a look at tablets, lo and
behold, sales are declining and the ones already bought are probably gathering
dust.

Most importantly is that Google's Android does not own 87% of the mobile
market. If Apple would switch to an alternative as the default, that would be
a big blow to Google. And if this move by Mozilla ends up working out without
Firefox losing market share, that might end up encouraging Apple to do so.

~~~
72deluxe
Is tablet market share really decreasing? For casual users (like my mum) she
has bought an iPad and no longer even turns on her PC/laptop, let alone thinks
about getting another one.

I thought this was the case with most "casual" PC users who only used it for
email and Internet shopping. My wife fits this category, who will never use my
laptop, ever. She even does basic spreadsheeting activities on the iPad with
Google Sheets.

Are tablets really sat around gathering dust?

~~~
diminish
I m monitoring several million MAU websites.. Smart phones are growing at the
expense of tablets too. Especially the consensus on larger screen sizes
boosted phone usage and cuts into tablet share.

~~~
72deluxe
Ah OK thanks. I suppose the division between smart phone and tablet is
disappearing a bit after the "phablet" revolution. I still have distinctly
different sized devices for phone and tablet; that would explain my confusion.
Thanks.

------
nchelluri
I am a Firefox user, and the switch encouraged me to explore non-Google search
engine alternatives.

For my personal browsing I tried Yahoo for a few days but have since switched
to using DuckDuckGo. It's definitely not bad. But for work, and for when I'm
not satisfied with the results, I still use Google. In my opinion, it is a
superior search engine.

~~~
adventured
Isn't DuckDuckGo primarily powered by Bing, which also powers Yahoo? Or has
this changed?

~~~
kome
DDG uses yandex a lot, not bing.

~~~
adventured
No, they still use Bing (assuming their site is accurate)

[https://duck.co/help/results/sources](https://duck.co/help/results/sources)

"DuckDuckGo gets its results from over one hundred sources, including
DuckDuckBot (our own crawler), crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, which are
stored in our own index), Yahoo! (through BOSS), Yandex, Yelp, and Bing."

------
amelius
Search has imho become too much of both a privacy intrusion, and at the same
time too much of a market determinant. I think the following has to happen.

(Just thinking out loud).

\- Search has to be made into a replaceable service, or a commodity. This
means that one could easily switch search providers without any other
noticeable difference (to the user) than a difference in search results.

\- This means that search engines should be stripped of their user-interface.

\- Search engines should "be" simply APIs that browsers can hook into. An
advantage of this, is that search engines could be denied the use of
scripting, which disables the possibility of user tracking through "device
fingerprinting".

\- Of course, if desired, the user could enable personalization.
Personalization could be handled like it is now (through user tracking). But
we could invent an API that reveals only a user's interests to a search agent.
For example, you could reveal that you are researcher or a programmer,
interested in technology, and certain programming languages, and you could
list a set of webpages that you use regularly.

\- Of course, different profiles could be used for different searches.

I imagine that the privacy-aware engines like DDG could start with the
development and implementation of these protocols, and cooperate with e.g.
mozilla for a base client implementation.

------
physcab
There's actually a very simple answer for this. When you go to Yahoo.com on an
iOS device it asks you if you want Yahoo to be the default search engine.
Since Yahoo is a popular portal (I go to Yahoo news atleast a few times a day
on my iOS device) people can inadvertently switch to Yahoo. This has happened
to me numerous times and I couldn't figure out why. Then I figured out that
Yahoo puts up a popup which I promptly clicked "ok" to get it out of the way,
then wondered time and time again why my iPhone was always ignoring my default
search preferences which was Google.

------
willvarfar
What a clickbait title :)

> Google’s slice of the U.S. search market fell to 75.2 percent in December
> from 79.3 percent a year ago, while Yahoo jumped to 10.4 percent from 7.4
> percent

I was expecting a landslide :)

~~~
sanxiyn
Well, for Yahoo, 10.4% from 7.4% is 40% increase.

------
QuantumGood
Google search is heavily SEO gamed, and that makes their algorithm heavily
weighted toward punishing page quality manipulation. If they could concentrate
more on rewarding page quality instead, they could deliver better results (see
the end of [http://goo.gl/y0AXWO](http://goo.gl/y0AXWO) )

------
alexhektor
Google scaled buys (e.g. toolbars/default searches) back massively while Yahoo
bought up that traffic.

------
krisgenre
Losing monopoly might actually be good for them.

~~~
IBM
Not in the US. That's been settled already and Google spends too much money on
lobbying for anyone to take a go at it (they also have a close relationship
with the Obama administration).

~~~
adventured
How would Google prevent a competing search engine from taking their market
share via lobbyist spending or any connections they have to the Obama
Administration?

~~~
CmonDev
By suppressing the "shouldn't we stop Google's monopoly" suggestions in senate
or whatever other ways USA uses for governing itself.

~~~
raverbashing
Yeah, maybe we can have a government subsidised search engine, powered by the
same people that did healthcare.gov right?

I don't think there's any monopoly to be broken _in search_ , it's just that
the competitors aren't up to that level.

(In other areas I might agree)

------
syoc
That headline is probably the only way to make a 4% decline in search share
sound like a lot. Bait.

------
aramadia
f we assume a modest 1:4 US to world ratio and a difference of 4.1% as
explained by the firefox switch, then the entire US firefox userbase is about
1% of the world. Google won't be sweating.

~~~
bzbarsky
Firefox only switched to Yahoo in the US so far. And Yandex in Russia, and
Baidu in China. It's using Google everywhere else, for now.

------
unicornporn
And Yahoo is Powered by Bing, right?

~~~
mtmail
Yahoo used to be powered by Google around 2004 and was still loosing market
share to Google. Blind tests with just the logo replaced (same web results)
had users still prefer Google. It was crazy. Disclaimer: I worked on Yahoo
search.

------
curiously
Genius move. Partner with Firefox, compete with Chrome. Move the search fight
to the browser, something that can be won unlike trying to force people to
move away from typing google.com vs yahoo.com

