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Google, Not Yahoo, Now Top Destination why?

As Google trounced Yahoo in various fields, fans of the second company could always point out that its sites received more U.S. traffic overall. New comScore stats show that this is no longer true.

In April, 140.6 million Americans visited Yahoo's properties, and 141.1 million stopped by Google's, according to the research company. Microsoft, if it matters, saw closer to 121 million visitors.

But even as it sits in third place, Microsoft's probably having a laugh over all this; comScore's news puts Yahoo in a significantly weaker position as Carl Icahn does his thing. Since Google achieved a higher year-over-year growth rate - 18
percent versus seven - it doesn't look like Yahoo is liable to take back the top spot on its own.

For Yahoo's supporters, here's the one encouraging point: Nathania Johnson reports, "Yahoo does still lead in page views, meaning either people are returning or are more engaged in Yahoo content. Yahoo had 33.6 billion page views while Google saw 28.7 billion page views."

Oh, and Yahoo should still have the lead in photo-sharing with Flickr, whereas Google is shutting down its Hello product.

Whatever happens in Google's peripheral industry dabbling, the search giant lives up to its core reputation by grabbing 67.9 percent of US searches in April, a 4 percent increase year-over-year, according to Hitwise.

The usual rivals are present in the top four with a noticeable decline for third-place breath-holder MSN. Microsoft's confusingly branded search engine dropped from 6.65 percent in March to 6.26 percent in April, down from 7.77 percent a year ago, and down significantly from search share once hovering around 12 percent.

Yahoo has shown little change over time, dropping from 20.29 percent in March to 20.28 percent in April. Ask.com showed an increase in usage, gaining from 4.09 percent to 4.17 percent. The remaining 45 search engines Hitwise measured accounted for only 1.4 percent combined.

Please share your thoughts as comments 'why Google is Top Destination?'.

1 comments:

  Anonymous

May 17, 2008 at 10:43 PM

Yahoo could have been the best search engine if they had joined Microsoft.