Google Expands to 63 Pct of Search Market

By Geoff Duncan Published September 19, 2008

Google Expands to 63 Pct of Search Market

At this point, it’s not news that Google is the dominant player in Internet searches: the company has led the field for years. What is surprising is how the company can continue to extend it’s lead in the search market month after month, with its gains seeming to come at the expensive of its (distant) competitors rather than simple growth of the overall Internet user base. Case and point: comScore has released its figures for U.S. Internet searches during August 2008, and found that Google accounted for 63 percent of the U.S. searches for the month. And, again, Google’s gain seems to have come at the expense of Yahoo and Microsoft, both of which saw their shares of the search market decline during the month.

Google’s jump to 63 percent of the U.S. search market represents the company’s largest single-month gain in five months, representing a 1.1 percent gain over its share in July 2008. Google handled almost 7.4 billion queries during the month, not including more than 2.5 billion searches performed at YouTube. Yahoo, the next-largest player in the search market, saw its share decline 0.9 percent to 19.6 percent. Microsoft sites (Live Search, MSN Search, etc.) also saw their cumulative share of searches go down by 0.6 percent to 8.3 percent.

Recommended Videos

Ask.com and AOL, while holding down the fourth and fifth places in the search rankings, actually saw their market share increase. Ask.com was up 0.3 percent to 4.8 percent, while AOL Search saw it’s share nudge up 0.1 percent to 4.3 percent.

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…

Computing

Google expands AI Overviews to over 100 more countries

AI Overviews being shown in Google Search.

Google's AI Overview is coming to a search results page near you, whether you want it to or not. The company announced on Monday that it is expanding the AI feature to more than 100 countries around the world.

Google debuted AI Overview, which uses generative AI to summarize the key points of your search topic and display that information at the top of the results page, to mixed reviews in May before subsequently expanding the program in August. Monday's roll-out sees the feature made available in seven languages — English, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish — to users in more than 100 nations (you can find a full list of covered countries here)

Computing

Google’s AI detection tool is now available for anyone to try

Gemini running on the Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold.

Google announced via a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Wednesday that SynthID is now available to anybody who wants to try it. The authentication system for AI-generated content embeds imperceptible watermarks into generated images, video, and text, enabling users to verify whether a piece of content was made by humans or machines.

“We’re open-sourcing our SynthID Text watermarking tool,” the company wrote. “Available freely to developers and businesses, it will help them identify their AI-generated content.”

Computing

This new Google Docs feature is exactly what I’ve always wanted

Text box in Google Docs on a laptop.

As a writer of a certain age, I've lived a lot of life in Google Docs. It's where my first drafts go, but it's also where my crazy ideas, unhinged brainstorming, and research dumps go.
There’s so many conveniences about Google Docs that make it my go-to for word processing, but let’s be honest: It’s still fairly barebones, especially when it comes to organizing and managing different files within Google Drive. But this new feature makes all of that much easier, keeping it all contained all within Docs itself.
It’s called Document Tabs, which you may have already noticed floating just to the left of your document.

The idea is simple: It lets you create multiple documents within a single Docs file. Create as many “tabs” or separate documents as a single project might need, and switch between them extremely fast. That accessibility to them is really where the gold is. No more switching between different browser tabs.
It’s even more handy on mobile, of course, where switching applications or tabs is even more cumbersome. Here, you’ll find Document Tabs hovering just at the bottom of the screen with some simple arrows to flip between your different tabs. All we need now is a simple gesture to be added to flip between them even more seamlessly.
Document Tabs takes the place of the old outlining system, which would grab headers and automatically create a table of contents around them. I used this frequently, but it was pretty finicky. More than that, it resulted in overly long documents that I still found myself scrolling through.
Document Tabs is a really elegant solution to that problem. Whether it’s segmenting chapters in a book, multiple aspects of a project, or even just different parts of an article, it’s already become an extremely useful outlining and productivity tool for me.
It even had a pretty clean way of converting the tabs when you need to export. All the tabs do is combine down into one document, but they’re sectioned off with titles and some basic formatting. That’s not going to be ideal in every situation, of course, so it’s something to keep in mind if you need to export and share it with someone outside of Docs.
At the very least, though, it’s worth trying out. And if you’re a Google Docs fiend like I am, I have a feeling you’ll get quite a lot out of it.