Even if Microsoft buys Yahoo it won’t affect Google’s dominance  

Even with all of the speculation that Microsoft will end up buying Yahoo, Google doesn’t have anything to worry about in regards to search dominance. According to what I see every month on several of the sites I own and operate Google clearly dominates the search referrals I see. Ninety-three percent (93%) of the search referrals I receive are Google, with MSN/Live trailing at 1.3% and Yahoo a measly 0.2% of referral of referral traffic. AOL search (powered by Google) provides more search referrals than Yahoo does on more than one of the websites I operate.

Below are the February 2008 statistics for designertoday.com (10 year old medium traffic website). As you can clearly see Google out performs all other search engines.





With the popularity of Google’s other services such as Google Docs, I think Google has such an pervasive presence online that Microsoft (including the Yahoo purchase) will not gain much traction with the launch (beta) of Office Live Spaces. While Microsoft does hold a tight grip on business productivity software (offline), the company has a very long battle to take online application market share away from Google.

Jason Calacanis (CEO of Mahalo) is claiming that Google will own ninety percent (90%) of the search market in the US within a year. From what I see each month, I believe that Google is already there.

“That's an insane prediction I was told, after I made it in front of a half dozen of the most important public market investors in the tech world at a conference recently (think the largest shareholders in Yahoo and Google). It was midnight and folks were on their second or third Macallan 25*, but folks immediately sobered up.” Jason Calacanis

I hope that, in the event that Microsoft ends up with Yahoo that the combined companies do become more aggressive and gain more of the online services market share, as it could only benefit consumers. Competition on such a grand scale will ultimately lower costs of products and services and with the US economy being in the shape it is in, would help tremendously.