Over 60% of US Internet searchers stick to Google.

It says a lot about Google’s position in US search, that a slight drop in its reported usage last month led to speculations on whether its time as a dominating force i World search was over. Would Yahoo! or Microsoft be able to take over the throne?

That will certainly take some time. Both Yahoo! and Microsoft is actively innovating: Microsoft, for instance, with its new Windows Live Search Engine.

What really matters, though, is search quality and relevance, and even though both Microsoft and Yahoo! have become better at combating spammy results lately, the results do not seem as good as Google’s, and they are definitely not better.

And history has shown that a majority of users flock to the search engine that delivers the best results.

Another factor helping Google is that is has become synonymous with search. Google hates the fact that “to google” has become a verb, but it is a sign of their amazing success. Many people think of Google first when they want to do a search, even if they make use of some of Yahoo!s and MSN’s services.

This means that the quality of Google’s search results will have to decline significantly for these users to abandon the Google ship.

However, the fall of Google is not impossible. Google itself replaced another champion search engine, AltaVista, a company that forgot that quality had to be the most important objective.

Top US search destinations

Hitwise argued in August that the Google dip could be caused by seasonal fluctuations. Indeed, according to Hitwise’s latest numbers Google is again over 60 percent of executed search volume for US Internet users.

The new list is now as follows:

www.google.com 60.29%
search.yahoo.com 22.58%
search.msn.com 11.86%
www.ask.com 3.63%

These statistics include searches made in the four weeks ending with September 9 2006.

Note that these are figures for search only. As a portal destination, the total yahoo.com domain is more popular than google.com.

The Hitwise Datacenter

By the way, Hitwise has become much more liberal with releasing interesting statistics to non-paying readers. The new Hitwise Datacenter also presents search numbers.

Top 25 Popular US Websites

Among some of the most interesting current list is the Top 25 Popular US Websites in August. Here is the top 10, which confirms our point about Yahoo! being a more popular portal destination than Google:

1. www.myspace.com 4.9%
2. mail.yahoo.com 4.6%
3. www.yahoo.com 4.24%
4. www.google.com 3.88%
5. mail.myspace.com 2.46%
6. www.hotmail.com 2.32%
7. www.msn.com 1.91%
8. www.ebay.com 1.61%
9. search.yahoo.com 1.37%
10. search.msn.com 0.93%

Top fastmoving US sites

The top fastmoving US sites of August were AOL Video and the search engine Digg4it.

(Why Digg4it is growing so fast is beyond us. As search engines go, this is one of the worst we have seen. It is clearly designed to get people to click on AdWords text ads only.)

Thanks to Dave Bascom for making us aware of the Hitwise Datacenter.