A VC

Everybody is watching the heavyweight fight between Yahoo! and Google in the search market.  Sure there are others out there who want to get into the ring, including Microsoft and AOL, but today, these two are the main event.

According to Comscore, one of my portfolio companies, Google's US market share is 38% and Yahoo! is 35%. So between the two, they own 73% of the US market.  Worldwide, Google is stronger, with 47% to Yahoo!'s 27%, but even worldwide, the two of them capture almost 75% of the market.

As Saul Hansell points out in a piece in today's New York Times, Yahoo!'s share is growing more quickly, particularly here in the US.

It's interesting to me because I use Yahoo! (my.yahoo.com to be specific) as my start page, but I use Google as the search field in Firefox, where I do most of my searching.  And I use Google's desktop search which further drives me toward Google when I do a search.  But for local search, maps, and yellow pages, I always go to Yahoo! because they have by far the best service for that kind of search.

I don't bother with anyone else on the web for "search".  I am using other stuff a lot more these days, including Bloglines, Feedster, Technorati, and del.icio.us.  As my friend and former colleague Seth Goldstein points out in the Hansell piece, there is a lot of "innovation among smaller sites in using blogs and other methods to associate, or tag, Web pages with information about their content".

It will be interesting to see how Yahoo! and Google incorporate these new developments into what they are doing.