Yahoo! Has Most Popular Search Engine (Again)

As expected, Yahoo! Inc.’s search engine dominated the field as the most popular for users to find information on the Net, according to a recent study.

The study, released by WebSideStory’s StatMarket.com, found that Yahoo! (YHOO) accounted for 43.55 percent of all search engine referrals as of August 29. That’s more than three times its closest competitor, AltaVista, which had 10.49 percent of the Web’s searches.

Yahoo! has had a comfortable lead in the search engine market for a while. In StatMarket’s last report, released in March, the megaportal provided 45.92 percent of Web searches.

Excite, Inc. (XCIT), which in March placed second with 21 percent of the Web’s searches, dropped to third on the list with only 9.85 percent. The 60 percent market share decline may be the result of America Online’s (AOL) decision in June to switch from Excite’s Netfind search to the Inktomi (INKT) search engine, the firm said.

The top 10 search engines are:

1. Yahoo! — 43.55%
2. AltaVista — 10.49%
3. Excite — 9.85%
4. Infoseek — 7.60%
5. AOL Netfind –4.34%
6. MSN — 3.96%
7. GoTo — 3.84%
8. Lycos — 3.72%
9. HotBot — 3.42%
10. WebCrawler — 2.94%

StatMarket.com’s information was compiled from more than 35,000,000
unique daily visitors to more than 130,000 Web sites using WebSideStory’s
HitBOX traffic analysis tool.