Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Calls of Note Part 2

- Bear Stearns notes Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) continued its strength in the international market by posting a 40bps gain to reach a 72.9% market share in October 2006. This is the highest market share level since the firm started tracking the data in early 2004. Google grew search queries by 60% YoY in October, meaningfully ahead of the industry growth at 52%, also marking an acceleration from 58% in September. They note that Google is the only major search site that consistently outperformed the industry since early 2005. Firm finds Google's strong growth particularly impressive given that it is growing from a much larger base.

Facing Google's aggressive market share expansion, Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) lost 20bps in October and came in at 15.4%, marking the third consecutive month of international market share loss. However, the firm points out that as comScore data is predicated on sampling from a limited amount of countries and Asian countries where Yahoo has strong presence are under-represented in the comScore data. Yahoo is the second fastest growing search site YoY among the top five at 56.5% YoY growth in October, down slightly from the 56.8% level in September but ahead of the industry growth at 52%.

Maintains Outperform on GOOG.

Notablecalls: Not actionable but good to know category.

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