Excite@Home Inc is reaping the rewards of losing its America Online Inc search engine contract to Inktomi Corp, as its market share dropped by 60% since January, according to statistics out yesterday from WebSideStory Inc. Over the same period Yahoo! Inc’s share of the market rose 7%.
The internet traffic measurement company said that referrals from San Diego, California-based Excite’s search engine fell from around 24% of all referrals during the first quarter of the year, to just 9.85% as of the beginning of this week. WebSideStory said the drop could be blamed on the June deal that saw AOL ditch Excite for San Mateo, California-based Inktomi.
Yahoo increased its lead at the top of the search engine league, with 43.55% of the market. Compaq Computer Corp’s AltaVista came in second, just ahead of Excite with 10.49%. WebSideStory uses applets placed on 130,000 web sites to measure metrics such as referring page, browser and OS.
