The Latest Analysis of Search Engine and Social Media Performances Makes for Interesting Reading

Google is known to dominate the search engine market, but June turned out to be a particularly good month:

It enjoyed the biggest slice of the market so far this year, garnering a total of 92% of all the searches made during the month rnYahoo was next, bringing in 2.96% of the total searches rnMicrosoft (aka Bing) wasn’t far behind on 2.88%

Perhaps most telling was the difference in percentages that was experienced by each of the three major players when compared to the previous month. Many SEO consulting companies will be happy to know that Google enjoyed a rise of 1.5%, while Yahoo dropped by 0.11% and Microsoft was down by 1.38%. It seems clear that their losses were mopped up by Google.

In terms of the annual change in search percentages since the same time last year, Google and Yahoo both measured small gains, while Microsoft experienced a loss of 0.24% over the course of the year.

Experian Hitwise also reported some interesting movements within the social media sector:

Facebook, perhaps not surprisingly, easily took the largest share of the social media market during June, with a healthy percentage of 53.72% This was up by 0.11% on May, although it still amounted to a drop of just over 1.5% year on year

YouTube settled comfortably into second place with 20.76% of all the visits seen in the sector during the month. This is a long way from posing any kind of threat to Facebook, but the video based website is also a clear distance ahead of the third placed website, Twitter. The micro-blogging site had just 3.22% of the total number of visits for June 2011. YouTube showed the healthiest increase year on year however, with a rise in visits of 3.72% overall. Twitter managed a rise of just over 1% in the same year long period.

Perhaps more surprising is the fact that LinkedIn, the business focused media network, came in at number six on the list. It was beaten into sixth place by Yahoo! Answers (in fourth place) and Gumtree in fifth. Some would speculate as to whether Gumtree really is a social media site in the general sense of the word, but it clearly receives a lot of visits every month. It also managed to keep its number of visits fairly steady compared to the previous month, dropping just 0.04% in the process.

It’s clear that Google and Facebook are both market leaders of their respective part of the internet. No survey needed to be done to tell us this, but the figures from month to month and year to year are still fascinating. They tell the ongoing story of these sections of the internet, revealing just how dominating the top two sites are in their own way.