Google still has a lot of competition

Keynote Systems made a study recently and reports that Google isn’t as far ahead in the search engine competition race as everyone thought.

Keynote's survey interviewed 2,000 consumers on the performance of Lycos, Yahoo Search, Google and Ask Jeeves and found that, although Google is still ahead of the game, Yahoo Search and MSN are close on its tail.

MSN’s decision to separate sponsored results lead them to better ratings since the last survey: 47% of users considered the engine “very useful,” versus 37% previously.

And Yahoo’s introduction of local search last year was, by this measure, a great success: they were tied with Google in terms of quality and ranking of local search.

But don’t think that's just because they like the product, users are brand-loyal with this stuff: 50% of those polled said they’d use another search engine if they didn't get the results they wanted.

Source: Search Engine Journal

The above study was done in the USA market which is very different to the rest of the world. In Australia for example Google holds a massive 70% of the search engine pie, with Yahoo and MSN making up the rest of the field. All other search engine are virtually non existent in the Australian market.