At the very excellent Search Engine Boot Camp in Sydney last week, Michael Walmsley from Hitwise provided some insight into the relative market shares of the major search engines. My main source of information up to now has been to assume the US figures from Nielsen Online somehow extrapolate to this side of the planet, and as I now know this is W R O N G.

Here are the figures:

Google and Google-controlled search properties: 83.0%
Microsoft (mainly ninemsn): 9.7%
Yahoo!: 5.6%

So yes, us Aussies are in love with Google. And most of us are smart enough to reset our browser’s home page from the install default (well, 90% of us anyway).

Wouldn’t you hate to be a search engine outside the big three? You have a massive 1.7% of the search market to fight for.