The Top 5 Search Engines
WGarth Callaghan
1. Google
2. Yahoo
3. MSN/Live
4. Ask
5. Everyone else (1.35%!)
How do you search for information on the internet? 72% of us are using Google. Yahoo has dropped to 17.5%. MSN/Live is only 5.5% and Ask rounds out the list with 3.5% of the search share. The rest of the crumbs are too small to even count totalling 1.35% combined.
Who are the 'up and coming' search sites? Cuil, pronounced 'cool,' launched to much fanfare last year. A team of Google executives left and launched Cuil, but it has yet to reach any significant search share. Our definition of significant is greater than 1%. Outside of the first week of the launch, Cuil captures less than 0.05% of the eyeballs searching on the internet.
Mahalo is a human powered search engine and had some high-powered internet gurus behind it. It is a great product, but again, trails behind even Ask.com.
Does any of this really matter? Each search engine will sort it's data differently, but you should get similar answers for any particular search in any particular engine.