Top 10 search engines

The Nielsen/NetRatings report which analyzed the top 10 search engines for November 2005 found Google Search to be the leader in this field capturing 46% of all searches.

During 2005 a staggering 2,365,998,000 searches were made using Google making it to be the Topper.

In second place was Yahoo! Search with only 23%, half that of Google Search.

It seems that Google Search is clearly head and shoulders above the competition.

The rest of the search engine pie was shared sparingly amoung the other players.

MSN Search came in third with 11% followed by AOL Search with 6.9%.

Fifth and sixth place were closely contested with My Way Search just ahead with 2.5% followed by Ask Jeeves Search at 2.3%.

There was very little in it for the last three spots with Earthlink, Dogpile.com and Netscape tie for seventh, eigth and ninth places.

iWon Search just made it into the top 10 at 0.5% of the 5.1 billion searches recorded in November last year.

According to Ken Cassar, a chief analyst for Nielsen/NetRatings, the rankings have remained stable over the past few months.

"The top five players have held their respective positions for the past six months, demonstrating the benefits of incumbency in the search arena," said Cassar.

Google Search has once again proved to dominate the search engine market.
But competition is heating up as companies start to develop search engines with a local flavour.

Recently South Africa witnessed a flourish in the local search engine industry with Funnel, eSearch and Jonga attempting to capture the South African audience.

Only time will tell if a close rival for Google Search will emerge, but for now Google is King.