Yahoo Growing Slightly Faster Than Google?

Nielsen//Netratings has released their search engine market share numbers for December 2006, and their year-over-year gains show that Yahoo, while having just under half the market share of Google, is growing faster than Google is. They show Google with 3.035 billion searches in December, up 22.6% from the year before, and Yahoo with 1.412 billion searches, up 30.1% from December 2005. This is kind of shocking, given that conventional wisdom is that Google is outpacing Yahoo, as the Y! slowly falls behind.
The whole chart:
Top 10 Search Providers for December 2006,
Ranked by Searches (U.S.)

Provider
Searches
(000)
YOY
Growth
Share of
Searches

———
——–
——–

Google Search
3,035,617
22.6%
50.8%

Yahoo! Search
1,412,904
30.1%
23.6%

MSN/Windows Live Search
499,946
-9.7%
8.4%

AOL Search
362,140
7.8%
6.1%

My Way Search
141,527
4.7%
2.4%

Ask.com Search
128,452
17.2%
2.1%

EarthLink Search
31,930
17.6%
0.5%

Dogpile.com Search
30,487
2.1%
0.5%

Comcast Search
26,931
N/A
0.5%

NexTag Search
26,835
123.2%
0.4%

Looking at the numbers for December 2004, December 2005, and December 2006, all reveals some interesting results.
Google:
December 2004: 1,414,778
December 2005: 2,475,895
December 2006: 3,035,617
Yahoo:
December 2004: 711,857
December 2005: 1,085,918
December 2006: 1,412,904
You can clearly see that, although Google gained 560 million users in the last year […]

Original post by Nathan Weinberg