Google Gets Stronger Despite Wall Street Battering

This ought to make all the Google fans out there happy. Even though Google (along with many others) have taken a beating on Wall Street for the past few months, search market share is still a figure that surely ranks up there on the importance scale. A new report released last month shows just how much Google outshines their closest competitors like Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.

U.S. Search Market Share - October 2008

Google - 71.70%

Yahoo - 17.74%

MSN - 5.40%

ASK -3.53%

Everyone Else (remaining 43 search engines) - 1.62%

So for SEO reasons, there have always been a few different schools of thought on which search engines you should place more importance on - the biggest arguement being that even though Google had the majority and is obviously important, there was still more than 30% of the search market share left to target (on other engines like Yahoo and MSN). But now as that gap closes (which it definitely is, considering that last October Google was at 64.49%), I think you’ll see more and more search marketers slowly move a majority of their SEO “eggs” into the metaphorical Google “basket”.