Most users loyal to multiple search engines, report finds

Google leads among search engines, growing its market share to 41% of online searches from 31% two years ago – but competition for users remains fierce among the top engines, and new, niche engines are joining the fray. For that reason, marketers who depend on search marketing need to develop an understanding of how consumers use multiple engines, according to a new Forrester Research report, “Search loyalty is hard to find.”

One indicator of consumers` willingness to travel among search engines is that the rise of a number of smaller engines has reduced the combined market share of online searches held by the top four engines – Google, MSN, Yahoo and AOL Search – to 83% in 2004 from 88% in 2003, according to report author, Forrester analyst Brian Haven. Despite its advantage of being on the first page MSN users see when they go online, MSN’s share dropped to 10% in 2004 from 17% last year, placing just ahead of AOL. Yahoo’s search has held steady in second place in terms of market share over the past two years.

While only 40% of online users say they are loyal to one of the four large search engines, 49% say they use multiple engines. Most users say their primary search engine is effective at finding relevant search results or researching specific topics, but nearly half of all consumers find their primary search engine ineffective at finding people, local businesses or multimedia content, according to Forrester’s findings. Users rated Google most effective of the four at most information-related search tasks, while Yahoo and MSN were rated more effective in finding music or video content. AOL was rated least effective of the four engines in 11 search tasks on which users were queried.

Forrester notes one implication of consumers` use of different engines is that for marketers who depend on search marketing, optimizing paid search for a single engine won’t deliver the results they seek. Instead, those marketers should turn to analytics tools to understand how consumers use multiple search engines, according to the research firm. “This is increasingly important not only as consumer search activity deepens within the search engines into verticals like shopping and video, but also as it widens to include specialized vertical search engines,” says Haven.

Forrester’s results were drawn from more than 5,000 North American consumers it queried about their online search and portal behavior.