Google share increases -- evidence continues to mount that this market has tipped to dominance

With the Google-DoubleClick merger reportedly in the final decision phase at the FTC, it will be interesting to learn what they ultimately conclude and if they have been monitoring recent market developments closely.  

In my Googleopoly analysis published in July, I explained in detail why the search market had already tipped to dominance and why Yahoo and Microsoft would continue to fall behind Google.

The incoming evidence continues to prove my Googleopoly analysis was dead on.

• Information Week reported that per Hitwise: Google's search market share increased in the last year from 61.84% to 65.1%, while during the same period Yahoo's share fell 1.22% and Microsoft's share fell 2.73%. 
  • To put that in perspective, in the last year alone per Hitwise, Yahoo lost 5% of its overall share while Microsoft lost a whopping 28% of its overall share. Whoa.
  • Not the kind of facts that are easy to ignore.
• Comscore has Google's share at 58.5% and also reports that Yahoo and Google are losing share. To put this in perspective again, Comscore had Google share at only 36.5% in April 2005.

There has been some reporting of Ask.com's new program "search eraser" which is a great new feature to help protect people's privacy that want it.

• Will Ask.com's search eraser have a material impact on the search market? I don't think so.
• Consider a sobering statistic. Ask.com overall 4.63 market share is roughly the size share that Google took from competitors in the last year alone.
  • Any benefit of search eraser is very likely to be overwhelmed with the tipping network effects strongly at work in the search market.

The relevance of Google's increasing dominance of search to the Google-DoubleClick merger is that it is obvious to me that adding DoubleClick's world-leading audience and adding the hundreds of advertiser relationships among the top 1500 in the world that Google does not have -- will further tip the online advertising market to "substantially less competition."

I look forward to learning how the FTC defines "substantial" in the context of this merger.

• If combining the #1 and #2 Internet audiences, advertiser networks and website networks is not substantial... I don't know what is...