MSN Crashes Up Against Google

Searches on search engines Google and Yahoo! last month were up 41 percent and 47 percent, respectively, ahead of searches in March 2005. MSN which trades in Australia as NineMSN was down 4%.

Searches on search engines Google and Yahoo! last month were up 41 percent and 47 percent, respectively, ahead of searches in March 2005.Nielsen/NetRatings also said the two companies Google and Yahoos March performance outpaced the overall search engine growth rate of 36 percent. In the US market alone Googles searches increased from 2.1 billion in March 2005 to 2.9 billion in March 2006, while in the same time period Yahoo`s searches increased from 907.8 million to 1.3 billion. Meanwhile, No. 3 Microsoft’s MSN US Search share dropped from 14 to 11 percent. The reason for MSN’s miserable March, and whether the customers who are no longer using MSN were instead at the Web sites of Google or Yahoo, couldn’t immediately be learned from Nielsen.

In Australia Google is trouncing both Yahoo and NineMSN. Google has an estimated 70% of the Australian search engine business with the rest split up between Yahoo and NineMSN. Some experts say that the only reason that NineMSN and Yahoo get traffic at all is because consumers and business use their email services, Hotmail at NineMSN and Yahoo Mail. The problem with this is that consumers are going in through the backdoor of these sites straight through to their email accounts and not spending time searching or access the front page or content pages on these sites.