Nielsen/NetRatings reports that Google accounted for 50 percent of all US searches conducted in April, followed by Yahoo! and MSN, with 22 and 11 percent. However, Google is not the leading web site of the US, nor does it control the social networking scene.

According to their press release [PDF file] Google has gained another three percent market share during the previous 12 months. Not much, maybe, but enough for us to conclude that the Google hegemony is far from over.

This doesn’t mean that all should be doom an gloom at Yahoo! and Microsoft headquarters. Search activity continues to grow, and according to NetRatings Yahoo! increased its number of searches with 27 percent last year, MSN 10 percent.

But again Google is the champion with a growth of 34 percent year over year.

Networking sites are growing

In a related announcement [PDF file] NetRatings said that April’s top 10 social networking sites collectively grew 47 percent year over year, “increasing from an unduplicated unique audience of 46.8 million last year to 68.8 million in April 2006, reaching 45 percent of active Web users.”

Social networking sites are sites that allow users to upload and comment on content. This is interesting also from a search engine viewpoint as these sites are heavy producers of content, the stuff the search engines thrive on.

Note also that companies like Google, Yahoo! and now also MSN uses contextual text ads to generate revenue, and such sites may be used to present advertising.

Amongst the most popular social networking sites we find MySpace, Blogger, Classmates Online, the brand new video forum YouTube, MSN Groups, AOL Hometown, Yahoo! Groups, Six Apart TypePad ( a blog tool) and Xanga, a tool for online diaries (listed in order of popularity).

This is, interestingly enough, not an area dominated by Google, although Google owns number 2 on the list: the online blogging tool Blooger. Google Groups is not on the list, and Google Video is clearly beaten by YouTube.

Yahoo.com is the leading web property

Moreover, if you measure the number of visitors to brand web sites (thus counting the number of visits to Yahoo! web sites — Yahoo! Mail included — instead of the number of searches only) the numbers again confirm that Google is not the obvious US leader.

According to NetRatings Yahoo! had the most popular set of web sites in April, with a unique audience of 105 million. Microsoft.com was number 2, msn.com — another Microsoft property — number 3 and Google.com number 4 (with an audience of 92 million).

Again, is the increasing importance of text ads that makes Google struggle to get control over the non-search part of this market. Don’t let the simple home page fool you. Google is now a portal, and it that market it has some catching up to do.