Google is the largest shopping center the world has ever seen.

Google IS the Internet in your customers minds.

If you are not ranked in the top ten, your company simply does not exist!

In this next serise of posts I'll demonstrate the massive overwhelming size of Google's Market Share to illustrate how important it is for your company to rank well in Google Local.

Many businesss owners are under the mistaken notion that if they can type their company name into Google, then their customers can find them.

MISTAKE

No one knows (nor do they care) what your company name is... people type in two things and two things only:

What they want

Where they want to find it

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On this day, July 11, 2009 if one Google's the phrase: Google Market Share one gets this:

http://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en#hl=en&q=google+market+share&aq=2&oq=google+market&aqi=g10&fp=1&cad=b

Way back in 2006 we found Google with almost half the market:

March 28, 2006 12:27 PM PST

Google's market lead widens

Google is increasing its lead over Yahoo and Microsoft in the U.S. Web search market while a rebranded Ask.com is inching up, according to the latest statistics from ComScore Networks.

Google's domestic market share rose to 42.3 percent in February, up from 36.3 percent a year earlier, ComScore said.

Yahoo's search market share in the United States fell to 27.6 percent from 31.1 percent a year ago, while Microsoft's MSN fell to 13.5 percent from 16.3 percent and Time Warner's America Online fell to 8 percent from 8.9 percent.

IAC Search & Media's Ask.com, which unveiled a new brand and interface last month, rose to 6 percent from 5.3 percent.

Analysts predicted continued gains for Google and Ask.

"We see little to stop Google from reaching 70 percent market share eventually; the question, really, comes down to, 'How long could it take?" RBC Capital Markets analyst Jordan Rohan wrote in a research note Tuesday.

read the rest...

By 2008 the power of a Google Listing for your business rose to 65% of the entire Internet Universe:

January 2, 2008 11:31 AM PST

Google's market share tops 65 percent

Google may not have monopoly power, but it certainly has monopoly mind share. As The New York Times reports, Google's search market share has jumped from 58 percent in March 2006 to 65.1 percent today. Yahoo? Less than one-third of Google's share. Microsoft? Less than one-ninth.

Monopoly? Not in the ordinary sense of the word. Google may well be aiming for a data monopoly to keep us close forever and ever, but for now it just has a brand monopoly that keeps users on its site, feeding it ever-increasing mountains of data.

We are feeding the beast, in other words. Whether it turns out to be a benevolent or malignant beast, however, is out of our hands. An interesting quagmire..

read the rest...

By July of 2009 that figure shrank from nearly 80% of ALL searches down to 78%

July 01, 2009

Microsoft's Bing Scratches Out 1% Market-Share Gain

Microsoft's new Bing search engine has eked out a slight gain in market share, according to statistics released Wednesday, but it has a long way to go before it catches up with industry leader Google.

Microsoft had 8.23 percent market share in June " the first month its Bing online search engine was available, according to StatCounter Global Stats, a Web site traffic analysis firm. That put Bing not far behind Yahoo's 11.04 percent market share but far behind Google's 78.48 percent.

Microsoft, which is trying to grow its online services business against Google, had a 7.21 percent share of the search market in April with its MSN Search and Live Search properties, according to StatCounter. Google's market share in April was 79.07 percent " meaning its share dropped slightly between April and June.

"At first sight, a 1 percent increase in market share does not appear to be a huge return on the investment Microsoft has made in Bing, but the underlying trend appears positive," said Aodhan Cullen, StatCounter's CEO, in a statement. "Steady if not spectacular might be the best way to describe performance to date."

Microsoft, for example, has been running a series of television advertisements that show zombielike people spouting nonsensical facts and data as a result of search overload " an effort to portray Bing as providing Web surfers with more of the information they are looking for.

Initially the market share of all Microsoft's search properties (Bing, Live Search and MSN Search combined) increased to 9.21 percent right after Bing debuted June 1, dropped back the next two weeks, then grew to 8.45 percent during the period of June 22 to 28, leading to the overall 8.23 percent market share for the month, according to Dublin, Ireland-based StatCounter.

read the rest...

June 5, 2009

Bing Steals Market Share from Google in First Week

Early stats from Statcounter show Bing taking off in a big way in the United States. As of yesterday, Bing was at 16.28% marketshare while Yahoo! hung out at 10.22% marketshare.

Meanwhile, Google's market share has dropped about 6 points from 78.07% to 71.99%.

Of course, Bing has only been live since Monday. It could just be curiosity. But if people are truly liking Bing, these numbers will be corroborated by comScore and Nielsen data. If that's the case, Bing may be a decision Microsoft got really, really right.

read the rest...

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Moral of this story?

If your company can be found in the top ten Google results, not for your company name, but for the keywords people type in to find what they want... you are in business.

If not... your competitors can and will take your lunch money.