Google's quarterly earnings report last week made clear just how successful the firm has been at monetising its vast search traffic. While Google controls 70 per cent of the UK search market, the next battle appears to be for personalised search and along with that, more targeted advertising. Web monitoring firm Hitwise reports that the winner on the personalised search front is far from clear. Many claim that Google is turning into a portal with the launch of services beyond search, such as Gmail, Google Talk, and Google Desktop Search. These products, while useful to the consumer, also allow Google to collect a great deal of information about its users. Yahoo! has long played in this space with Yahoo! Mail and My Yahoo!, while MSN’s Messenger and Hotmail offerings give it a head start. To allow for a comparison among these "portals", Hitwise created an aggregated view of the visits to the ten most visited properties of MSN, Yahoo! and Google in the UK in September. MSN is the largest of the portals, but Google is catching up - Quick! MSN is the largest portal in the UK based on an aggregated share of visits to its top 10 properties in September 2005, attracting 1 in 7 internet visits. Google was less than 1 per cent behind in September, catching up with MSN quickly over the past year. In September 2004, the percentage difference between the market share of MSN and Google's aggregated properties was 42 per cent. The gap between Google and MSN has even reduced in the past month, from 5 per cent in August. [Full Story at 999today]
I love the US television show "Boston Legal" - for those who are also familiar with it, I equate this to someone mentioning "Denny Crane" ... simply saying "Goolge" on the NYSE floor and a shutter, shiver and sensation is created boosting their stock