BusinessWeek has an article asking whether Google’s 52% market share is too much of a lead for the other search engines to catch.
Google’s share of U.S. searches hit 52% in June, up from 45% a year ago, according to Web analytics firm WebSideStory Inc. By contrast, Yahoo’s and MSN’s share slipped to 25% and 10% respectively.
Google’s search lead, moreover, looks pretty unassailable, at least for now. Despite many studies indicating the near-parity of rival search technologies, changing searchers’ habits is more difficult today than in the Web’s early days, when surfers hopped from Yahoo to Excite to AltaVista and back.
One familiar yet persistent reason for this loyalty is Google’s spartan home page, which includes just 13 links or so — less than a tenth of the number at MSN and Yahoo.
I would agree that Google is here to stay and its going to be very hard for anyone to overtake them, mainly because they have such a strong name and they just have better results then anyone else.