This post continues a series that got left behind when I stopped posting in around February.  The latest (September 2007 ) Nielsen Online report for search engine market shares in the USA has been out for a few weeks, and shows the continued rise of Googlesque dominance. Given that AOL uses SERPs from Google as well, it really shows that it's the  only game in town at the moment.

    * Google Search - 54.0%
    * Yahoo! Search - 19.5%
    * MSN Live Search - 12.0%
    * AOL Search - 6.0%
    * Ask.com Search - 2.2%

The remaining search engines duke it out for the 6.3% that's left.

In these figures I've included Ask for the first time. Reason is, now that Ask can accept sitemap.xml files (like Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft), it's sorta wise to think about including them in any traffic generation strategy. They may only be 2.2%, but that's still a seriously large 160 million searches each month. 

One other point. The number of searches has increased big time. Nielsen Online assert Google's monthly search numbers at 4.0 billion - extrapolate with the market share figures, that's a whopping 7.4 billion searches globally in a month.