2006-08-04

Buy Google, Short Yahoo!



This is the search engine referral on this blog site. My readers may not be representative of the general market, nor is the sample size large enough to be statistically significant. But the trend couldn't be clearer. Google is winning the search engine war.

I would appreciate if other site-owners can compare their results with mine. Many thanks.

Notes:
1) to say shorting Yahoo is probably an overstatement, because search engine is not the predominant revenue source for Yahoo. But it is sizeable. And buy-short will mitigate the industry risk (i.e. neutral to industry/market cycles).
-- Just like what I have advocated when HP acquired Compaq -- buy Dell, Short HP
2) This result is also insensitive to my new posts, because most of the search results pointed to some old posts (eg RMB currency issues, GDP-scaled maps, etc.)
3) This result does not tell you directly the % of search engine market share. Instead, it tells you who CLICKED THROUGH the result returned by the search command. So, Google has been turning in results that are more relevant to what users have in mind as well.
Categories:

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Google sends me at least 90% of search engine traffic. MSN second. Yahoo? Statistically insignificant.

See this too:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/256748_yahoo24.html

When it comes to search, Y is quite irrelevant.

Anonymous said...

Shorting Yahoo is retarded.

Sun Bin said...

lfc: that probably tells a lot of how miserably yahoo performs in market outside US, esp greater china area. (and why they 'sold' it to alibaba)

Anon: to be market neutral you need to do "long short", if you really believe yahoo has great potential in its media business (which may be true), you need to pick another company to short. Otherwise you lose big time if there is a tech crash like that in 2000.

Sun Bin said...

LfC, can you see trends over the past few months? or has google been 90% all the time?

Anonymous said...

Google is always the only search engine that matters for my blog. I am still a bit puzzled as to the assertion of "big three" in SE market.

Anon - with no search capacity Y can never develop contextual ad (G's Adwords/Adsense), which appears to be the future of advertising.