One way to capture market share in search…

…bring your search to users. According to a study completed by ComScore, MSN, AOL and Yahoo had search market shares of 39.4%, 50.0% and 46.2%, respectively, in a certain market as compared to their overall market shares of 10.3%, 4.8% and 27.8%, respectively. What was that segment of users? It was the segment of users that purchased internet access from ISPs that had partnerships with each of these companies.

The moral of the story…if you make it easier for users to use your search engine than it is to open a new browser and go to www.google.com (assuming it isn’t already their home page, which it is for me), then you can gain significant search traffic. This is a big reason why Toolbars are critically important and why Microsoft just struck a deal with HP to get their browser/search box installed on every PC by default (Google has done this with Dell for many years).