Yahoo falls to third in search behind YouTube -- Google-Yahoo is the 'dunking point' for competition

Google's three-year-old video subsidiary, YouTube, now generates more searches than any other site or competitor in the U.S. -- surpassing #2 Yahoo in August per Comscore's U.S. expanded search rankings.

• Another way to look at this milestone is that Google:
  • is now both #1 and #2 in search,
  • is seeking an ad outsourcing partnership with the #3 and #8 players in search -- in the proposed Google-Yahoo ad partnership,
  • to go along with Google's existing ad outsourcing partnerships with the #5, #6, #7, #9, and #11 players in U.S. search.  
• Kudos to Ms. Klaassen of Ad Age and Mr. Helft on the NYT Bits Blog and for flagging this search ranking milestone.

The new ComScore August 2008 search rankings spotlight the awesome search cartel reach Google has assembled:

1. Google         7.594b -- Google
2. Youtube       2.564b -- Google-owned 
3. Yahoo          2.427b -- proposed Google partner
4. Microsoft      1.021b
5. AOL              .839b  -- Google partner
6. Fox/MySpace  .593b  -- Google partner
7. IAC/Ask.com  .572b  -- Google partner
8. eBay             .434b  -- Proposed Google partner via Yahoo
9. Craigslist       .335b  -- Google partner
10. Facebook       .186b  
11. Amazon         .168b  -- Google partner

• Note:
  • Numbers are in billions of searches generated.
  • These top eleven sites comprise ~97% of all searches generated in the United States.

Overall what the Comscore data show is that:

• ~63% of U.S. share is Google-YouTube; 
• ~13% of U.S. share is Google current partners: AOL, Fox/MySpace, IAC/ask.com, Craigslist, and Amazon.
• ~17% of U.S. share is Google proposed partners Yahoo and eBay (Yahoo outsources search for eBay in U.S.; Google does search for eBay internationally.)

Thus, the Google-Yahoo ad partnership is about expanding the Google search partnership cartel from 76% of the U.S. search market to 93% of the U.S. search market. (See Googleopoly II (p.5) for background on the cartelization of search.)

Bottom line: If this is not a search cartel expanding and tightening its market power grip on the market to the detriment of advertisers and publishers, then antitrust law is no longer relevant to protecting competition in the Internet age.

• Google has already passed the 'tipping point' toward an anti-competitive cartel by controlling 76% of the U.S. search market.. 
• An approved Google-Yahoo partnership would be "the dunking point" for Internet competition.