Number of Indexed Web Pages
A couple of years ago, search engine competed on how many web page they indexed. They continuously put larger and larger number on their home page and sometimes one party which wrote a smaller number argued that other parties overestimated the number or had different methods of calculation. Recently, Google removed this number from the home page. Later, Yahoo! and MSN followed. It seems that the number of indexed web pages is not so interesting any more. Many people estimate that there are tens of billions of web pages on the “surface web” and far more hidden web pages from searchable databases in the “deep web”.
Number of Queries
Instead of having a war on the number of indexed web pages, currently search engines compete on how many queries users submit to their search engines, which is directly related with the revenue of a company. There are some Internet media research companies are reporting these numbers. The most frequently quoted numbers are from Nielson//NetRatings and comScore. Nielson//Rating has a monthly report about query shares of search engines. In November 2006, an estimated 6.2 billion queries were conducted at U. S. search engines. Google is on the top and has 3.1 billions queries (49.5% share). The following search engines are Yahoo! (24.3%), MSN (8.2%), AOL (6.2%), and Ask (2.6%). Monthly estimates of U.S. search engine queries in the second half of 2006 by Nielson//Ratings are as follows.
October: 6.0 billion; September: 5.6 billion; August: 6.0 billion; July: 5.6 billion; June: 5.4 billion; June: 5.7 billion.
Google consistently takes 50% share of U.S. search queries. Yahoo! is around 25%~30% and MSN is around 8%~10%.
Monetization of Queries
Although the number of conducted search queries are directly related with the money that search engine companies can make, but it is not proportional to ad revenue. Ad revenue also depends on the advertisement auction and placement system. For example, although Yahoo! search share is about 1/2 of Google share, Yahoo! ad revenue is only about 1/4 of Google ad revenue. According to the estimate of Caris & Co. analyst Tim Boyd,
“Yahoo made on average between 10¢ and 11¢ per search in 2006, bringing in a total of $1.61 billion for the first nine months of the year. Google, meanwhile, makes between 19¢ and 21¢ per search. As a result, it made an estimated $4.99 billion during the same period.” (Quoted from an article of BusinessWeek)
