Google is the king of search, there is no doubt about that. How quickly the phrase "I'll Google for it" has entered into public vernacular, almost as if the word Google itself has become synonymous with searching for information on the Net. Yes, Google has conquered search, but it appears that it has a long way to go to conquer other realms such as Mail, News and Finance. Hitwise has compiled a table to show how Google, Yahoo and MSN are doing in the portal wars, as according to activity for the week ended May 13th. The results are a bit of a horror story for Google.
Google's share of the search market is a whopping 47.4 %, compared to Yahoo at 16 % and MSN with 11.5 %. But in the email arena, Google is non-existent at only 2.54 %, compared with Yahoo Mail at a kick ass 42.4 % of email visits, and MSN Hotmail at 22.9 %.
For news, things were still a success story for Yahoo, with that company gathering more visits than the Weather Channel, MSNBC, and CNN, with a 6.3 % share. Google News lagged behind at fifth place with a miserable 1.9 %.
For the finance area, Yahoo again manages to take the lead, with 34.9 % of visits. MSN Money Central was in second place with 13.4 %, and Google Finance was struggling behind with 0.29 % at 40th place.
Google is clearly trying very hard with new products and services to break away from merely being a search engine, but from these results it appears that the company has a long way to go before it can challenge an established portal like Yahoo for other services.