Troogle would have a battle on its hands

Heather Hopkins at Hitwise writes again:

To follow on from fellow Hitwise blogger Bill Tancer’s wildly popular post on how Google, Yahoo! and MSN's properties stack up, I wanted to share the same data from the UK market.

We are publishing these stats alongside the US market stats in a search report this week. If you'd like a side-by-side comparison, you can request a copy of the report from the link on our home page.

We found that similar to the US, Google's search property is hugely popular while many of its other sub-domains have yet to take off. Each Google property that is announced creates a storm of attention from commentators and search enthusiasts.

However, UK consumers don't seem to be paying a whole lot of attention.

The most extreme example is Google Finance, which ranked #201 in the week to 20 May 2006, with .04% of category visits. Yahoo! UK & Ireland Finance was ranked #1 by contrast, with 8.30% of category visits.

Google certainly does have a lot of weight to throw around, powering 77% of UK internet searches, but that doesn't mean that Google dominates in all of the verticals it enters - as the table below illustrates.

I had a good catch up with Simon Ferguson and Kevin May at Travolution today [thanks for plug – Ed]. We chatted about the possible impact of Troogle in the UK. Based on the table below, if Google were to enter the Travel vertical search space - it might not have the impact we in the industry expect.

[More Troogle on Hitwise Blog here]

Portal property ranking and market share by vertical, week ending 20 May 2006

Computers and Internet – email services

1 MSN Hotmail (52.37%)
2 Yahoo! Europe Mail (17.16%)
3 Yahoo! Mail (6.33%)
8 Google Mail (2.2%

News and Media

1 BBC.co.uk (15.82%)
2 BBC News (13.59%)
5 Yahoo! UK & Ireland News (1.67%)
7 Google News UK (1.48%)
14 Yahoo! News (0.76%)
28 Google News (0.39%)

Business & Finance – business information

1 Yahoo! UK & Ireland Finance (8.3%)
5 MSN Money UK (3.46%)
6 MSN MoneyCentral (3.19%)
10 Yahoo! Finance (2.95%)
201 Google Finance (0.04)

Travel – Maps

1 Multimap.com (32.44%)
2 Streetmap.co.uk (15.11%)
3 Google Maps (13.11%)
5 Google UK Maps (4.49%
6 Google Earth (3.98%)
12 Ask.com UK Maps (0.69%)
16 MSN Virtual Earth (0.47%)
22 Yahoo! Maps (0.27%)

Shopping & Classified – Rewards and Directories

1 Kelkoo (9.98%)
2 Shopping.com UK (4.4%)
7 Froogle UK (2.49%)
11 MSN Shopping (2.16%)

Heather Hopkins, director of research, Hitwise UK

Read more Heather’s Blog here