According to Nielson Online, 64.1% of searches were performed using Google in November 2008, 16.1% using Yahoo!, 9.1% using MSN and 2.3% using Ask.com.
J.P. Morgan recently conducted research to see what factors (if any) would encourage a switch to an alternative search engine. Interestingly, 45% of respondents said that if better search results were achieved with an alternative search engine they would change, yet as you can see from the table below 38% would not switch over at all.
Here is a breakdown of the results from the poll:
Factors that would cause search engine switching
| % of participants | All | AOL | Ask | MSN | Yahoo | Other | |
| Results that better match my search term | 45% | 42% | 25% | 48.6% | 33.3% | 43.3% | 34.8% |
| Results that include video, web, music and other forms of information | 11.5% | 12% | 18.8% | 11.5% | 14% | 9.6% | 13% |
| A more uncluttered easy to navigate site | 26.5% | 30% | 31.3% | 24.9% | 36.8% | 29.9% | 17.4% |
| The ability to preview web content | 22.6% | 24% | 25% | 21.9% | 22.8% | 26.1% | 8.7% |
| Faster response speed to searches | 27.8% | 36% | 18.8% | 25.8% | 35.1% | 29.3% | 26.1% |
| Other | 0.7% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.7% | 3.5% | 0.0% | 0.0% |
| Nothing, happy with current search engine | 38.2% | 30% | 31.3% | 37.5% | 38.6% | 41.4% | 52.2% |
What factors would cause you to use a different search engine?
