The planned Microsoft-Yahoo online search tie-up has promise but must overcome people’s fierce loyalty to market king Google, industry tracker comScore said on Friday.
“The recently announced search partnership between Microsoft and Yahoo certainly makes the combined entity a more formidable competitor to Google in the US search marketplace,” comScore search evangelist Eli Goodman said. “While they are still looking up at Google in terms of market share, they have a real opportunity to make headway given that nearly three-quarters of all searchers conduct at least one search on these engines every month.”
The challenge for Microsoft and Yahoo will be to make their joint search offering compelling enough to convert occasional users into habitual visitors, Goodman said.
With their partnership announced late last month, software giant Microsoft and Internet portal Yahoo are hoping to steal market share — and advertising dollars — from the company that has come to define Web search.
Under the terms of the deal, Microsoft’s freshly launched Bing search engine will handle queries at Yahoo Web sites.
A comScore analysis released on Friday said that Google had the highest loyalty rate among US Internet users, with people trusting the bulk of their online searches to the California firm.
In June, Google had a 65 percent share of the core search market, compared to 28 percent for Yahoo and Microsoft combined, comScore said.
“Separately, Yahoo and Bing are unable to efficiently meet the inventory needs of advertisers which are attainable through Google,” said Craig Macdonald, a senior vice president at analysis firm Covario. “The combination of the two platforms, however, gives advertisers the ability to reach about 30 percent of the search market in a more efficient manner.”
A search market share of 30 percent represents a “critical threshold” for many marketers when it comes to justifying spending national advertising dollars, Macdonald said.
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