It should be no surprise that a new study from Nielson Online finds that the search engine market is dominated by Google with well over half of the market and the largest gain since 2007.
In the U.S., more than eight billion searches were conducted from November 2007 to November 2008 and according to Nielson Online, 64.1 percent of them were done using Google.
The technology behemoth is far and away the most popular search engine with Yahoo coming in a distant second with 16.1 percent of the market.
But what might be more disturbing for companies like Yahoo and Microsoft is the increase in Google’s popularity over the previous 12 months.
According to the report, Google saw its searches increase by 21 percent over the course of the year while Yahoo and MSN/Windows Live Search saw their searches drop 1.4 percent and 16.7 percent respectively.
As a whole, the search engine industry saw its numbers increase with the total amount of searches increasing 9.6 percent, but aside from Google, only AOL Search and Comcast Search saw any increases over the year.
The report is in line with another study from comScore which found Google to have 63.5 percent of the market.
