What's the Real Market Share Number?

Fri, 05/08/2009 - 08:30 by Greg Sterling

I was asked by a journalist a couple of days ago what was mobile search market share right now. I said it's directionally consistent with the PC world, where Google has between 60% and 72% market share depending on your source. Then I went and looked at our survey numbers, comScore, Nielsen and then found the following datapoint from Net Applications. Keep in mind that this is reportedly for smartphones, not all mobile handsets. But this is in a way shocking: Google has 97.6% market share?

Net applications smartphone search marketshare

Granted Google has invested a lot in mobile, but the numbers seem too high to be credible. 

Last year, these were Nielsen's general mobile search US numbers:

  1. Google  (61%)

  2. Yahoo!  (18%)
  3. Microsoft  (5%)

In August, 2008 this is what we saw for North America across handset types (n=800):

  1. Google  (55%)

  2. Yahoo!  (16%)
  3. Microsoft  (13%)
  4. Carrier search engine (9%)
  5. AOL (6%)

We have some new North America numbers that show a smaller gap between Google and Yahoo! but the base is smaller.