Google’s dominance

Google’s dominance of the Internet in the United States is hard to overstate. The company accounts for two-thirds of all Web searches, it owns YouTube, which is 10 times more popular than its nearest competitor, and it is No. 1 in areas like maps and blogging. Over all, Internet users in the United States spend 9 percent of their time online on some Google service, according to comScore.

Yet there are places where Google is far more dominant. India and Brazil stand out, according to new data that comScore made available to The New York Times. In those countries, for every hour people spend online, about 18 minutes are on a Google service.

To be precise, Google accounts for nearly 30 percent of people’s online minutes in Brazil and nearly 29 percent in India. The next country in terms of Google’s dominance is Ireland, where it accounts for 16 percent of online minutes.

The global average is 9.4 percent, or slightly higher than in the United States.

Google’s gaping lead over rivals in Brazil and India is in part the result of an anomaly: Orkut, Google’s social network, which has been a failure pretty much everywhere else in the world, is No. 1 in those two countries. But Orkut is only part of the story.

In Brazil, Google captures nearly 90 percent of all searches, 71 percent of the time spent on maps (compared with just 42 percent here) and 43 percent of the time spent on blogs (compared with 30 percent here). In India, it represents 88 percent of searches, 64 percent of maps and 48 percent of blogs. Gmail accounts for nearly half of the Indian Web e-mail market, compared with just 6.4 percent here.

Andrew Lipsman, director of industry analysis for comScore, said that Google’s dominance in those countries has historical reasons. While on opposite sides of the world, when it comes to the Internet, India and Brazil developed in parallel, he said.
 
“Part of the explanation was that Google emerged onto the scene at the time these markets were developing,” Mr. Lispman said. “As Google became the default search engine, the brand extended to these other services.”
There are other countries, of course, where Google has not been able to beat local brands — notably China, the Internet market with the most users, where it lags behind Baidu, and Russia, where Yandex is the leading search engine.

But India is ranked seventh, and Brazil ninth, in terms Internet use globally. They are also two of the fastest-growing markets.

That growth obviously bodes well for Google. It also suggests that Google still has room to increase its dominance in the United States and makes it clear just how challenging it is for a rival like Microsoft to compete against Google globally.