Comments on: Skrenta: Google Already Has 70% Market Share

By: dumbfounder

dumbfounder — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 22:46:53 +0000

Google crawls and indexes faster than the others, so for very dynamic sites they will deliver more traffic. Topix.net is definitely a more dynamic site. For http://www.searchles.com we get about 95% of our search engine traffic from Google because our content is quite amorphous.

By: James Brunskill

James Brunskill — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 22:01:02 +0000

Tim Bray, Jeremy Zawodny, and Jakob Nielsen that's some big name commenters!

Heres my two cents...

I think we need to ask these questions:
1. Is the number of search referals a good predictor of number of searches?
For example I use Yahoo to search for podcasts, link analysis etc. But mainly use google to search for websites...
Also as already mentioned here, if one search engine requires more search attempts to find the content, that would skew the results.
However I think the idea that different search engines would be used to find different content is more likely...

2. Do a high percentage of yahoo search queries result in further links to yahoo properties?
If yahoo properties account for 11% of site visits then conceivably a lot of there search traffic is going to another yahoo property. Yahoo properties would push you towards using the yahoo search then push you back towards more yahoo stuff...

3. Just because Hitwise provides accurate statistics for topix.net does that mean it is accurate for other sites?

If I understand Rich Skrenta he has looked at the stats for his site topix.net compared it with hitwise then effectively extrapolated that the same relationship will hold for other sites. This may not be true...
Remember hitwise are the same guys who are reporting a 60% google market share...

Out of interest over the last month my site (http://www.jambe.co.nz) seems to have had 58% google 20% yahoo and the other 20% from a variety of very small numbers. This is a very low traffic site so I wouldn't put much weight on it...
I don't have the stats for my blog at the moment, I have hittail running but it doesn't give you counts of total number of search referrals by searchengines.

By: Jakob Nielsen

Jakob Nielsen — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 18:09:27 +0000

For my sites, here are the percentage of search engine-derived traffic over the last two months:

useit.com (content site)
94% Google
4% Yahoo
1% Ask
1% other search engines combined (<0.5%)

nngroup.com (business site)
92% Google
5% Yahoo
1% MSN
2% other search engines combined (<0.5%)

Note that both of these sites are unrepresentative of the broader audience, becuase they target people interested in usability, i.e., members of the high-tech elite.

Also, for these sites, most of the search traffic is irrelevant, consisting of "tourists" and not loyal readers. Users who subscribe to the email newsletter or who go directly to the sites are more important. People who follow links from 3rd-party sites are in-between search users and loyal users (non-search sites are not included in the above statistics, but they account for 35% *more* traffic than search: see previously published chart).

By: Rich Skrenta

Rich Skrenta — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 17:54:16 +0000

I assume Yahoo's numbers would include that search traffic from their vertical properties. That's entirely appropriate and should be an important source of monetization for them. But they all point at search.yahoo.com, which is where the outbound refer will be seen from.

By: arkadaş

arkadaş — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 16:46:52 +0000

How is the marketshare data collected? I’ve long suspected that Yahoo’s numbers include queries from to their applications (i.e., a search in Yahoo Cars). Although this is indeed a search, the assumption is the query number reflects web searches. Any thoughts on this?

By: Craig

Craig — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 16:35:24 +0000

By: Jeremy Zawodny

Jeremy Zawodny — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 14:36:21 +0000

Hashim: Good try, but not even close. “Jeremy” is rarely in the top 5 for my site based on search referral logs.

By: Hashim

Hashim — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 14:28:42 +0000

For Jeremy Zawodny’s site, he is the first result for the name “Jeremy” in Google. Perhaps that is why 90% of his searches come from Google.

By: Rich Skrenta

Rich Skrenta — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 14:01:05 +0000

Hitwise has taps on the traffic at a bunch of major ISPs so they’re looking at actual web usage traffic on the net. It’s not nonsense like 1960′s people-meters with ridiculously small sample sizes. Jeremy confirmed the accuracy of the stats inbound to his site as well; this is signficant because, while his blog is popular it’s not got youtube’s traffic, so the accuracy at the small site level also seems to be quite good.

By: ~ SearcH EngineS WeB ~

~ SearcH EngineS WeB ~ — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 09:02:08 +0000

The only void in that article is, the method for attaining the stats from the Websites profiled was not revealed. So one can not access the accuracy. However, it appears to be logical.

Would Battellemedia make its stats public just for analysis puposes?

Please consider installing the free version of Sitemeter just for on month.

These are the public stats for the other most popular Technorati blogs

http://seoptimization.blog.com/1221628/