Google continues to dominate search market

30-03-2006

by Charlie Taylor

As Google gets ready to join the elite S&P 500 Index, a new study reveals that it remains the most popular search engine in the US.

The search giant announced on Wednesday that it intends to issue 5.3 million extra shares in order to meet the needs of index funds anxious to purchase Class A common stock in Google when it replaces oil giant Burlington Resources on the Standard & Poor's 500 index at the close of trading on Friday 31 March.

The sale of the new shares is expected to raise more than USD2 billion for Google and in a press statement, the firm hinted that it could be looking to reinforce its market dominance by stating that it may use some of the proceeds for "possible acquisitions of complementary businesses, technologies or other assets."

Rumours suggest that the search giant is intent on diversifying its advertising-focused business model by developing a new online retail platform which would offer traditional high-street retailers the opportunity to market and sell their goods via the internet.

According to a number of recent media reports, the search engine is planning to add e-commerce transaction capabilities to Google Base, a database service that allows internet users to post content to the search engine's index.

In other news, figures released on Wednesday by the web tracking firm ComScore reveal that Google continues to be the most popular search engine in the US.

ComScore's data indicates the search engine giant's market share totalled 42 percent in February, up 6 percent year-over-year. During the same period, Google's biggest rival Yahoo recorded a 4 percent drop in market share to 27 percent while MSN fell by 3 percent to 13 percent.

The ComScore statistics also reveal an increase of 11.1 percent year-over-year in the total number of search queries carried out.