News from the Search Engine War

Tekrati, a research and analysis company, has published a new report about the competition between search engines.

Tekrati's analysis is based on data recorded by the Hitwise service, which is monitoring 250 million Internet users. According to this data, the Google, Yahoo, MSN triumvirate is the leader of the online searches, 93.5% of the American queries being done on one of these engines.

Google still has the lion's share, with almost 60% of the searches (59.2%, to be more precise), a 14% increase compared to last year.
Yahoo gets 28.8% of the searches, while MSN Search is far behind the first two places, with 5.5%.

Tekrati analysts say that Google's results are even more impressive, considering that the search engine doesn't have a portal that brings visitors, as Yahoo Search and MSN Search do. According to Hitwise, 71% of Yahoo Search's traffic is coming from Yahoo.com, while 61% of MSN's visitors are also doing a little bit of MSN Search.

Yahoo is also the leader at local searches, Yahoo Local (local.yahoo.com) being 4.4 times more accessed than Google Local (local.google.com).

It's interesting to watch the evolution of this data, following Yahoo's announcement related to the number of indexed pages and the launching of the Yahoo Audio Search service.