Search referrals - July 2006 snapshot
Here’s a quick snapshot of incoming search engine referrals for the past few weeks. Compare this with another post last year on search engine referral share, recently referenced in a post at Alexa noting the discrepancy between the published search engine traffic reports and anecdotal observations by webmasters.
Is it just me, or are these charts a bit goofy? Does Yahoo really still have 23% of the search market? Is Google at less than half the search market?
I don’t believe it. Any webmaster will tell you that Google represents almost ALL of the search engine traffic. Yahoo is nowhere near 23%. Just read the blogs, here, here, here and here and on countless other blogs.
Already at 82% last October, Google has increased to even more of the incoming search traffic (92%) here, largely at the expense of “Other”. In the fall, it looked like those were mostly miscellaneous Chinese search engines, so perhaps my site is not getting indexed or ranked well there anymore, or Google is picking up market share, or both.
Some of the commenters at the Alexa post noted increasing traffic from Microsoft / MSN / Live search, including one who got most of their traffic through MSN search. I’m a little surprised that I don’t see more traffic from Yahoo and Microsoft search here, but that may also be a function of who’s likely to be searching for a given topic.
See also Greg Linden’s comments on the competitiveness of Yahoo and Microsoft search efforts
Tags: search, google, yahoo, microsoft, alexa, internet, traffic
July 29th, 2006 at 7:32 am
Ho John –
First, nice blog!
I can certainly confirm the “Google Rules the World” theory. Several sites that my company runs (which I won’t link for fear of being another spammer
are targeted at a fairly middle-of-the road audience and the vast majority of our traffic is from Google (>75%). This is true of another company I work with that has really large traffic numbers, and are truly global. These percentages are about the same for both free traffic and from parallel ad campaigns on AdWords, Overture, and Msn’s new PPC ad service.
And as Google keeps coming out with great products, and Yahoo with not much more than me-too stuff, it makes sense. Recent earnings from Google and Yahoo echo this trend nicely.
I recently went to the PubCon (Webmaster World) conference in Boston. Matt Cutts (Google), Jeremy Zawodny (Yahoo) and Robert Scoble (Microsoft) were answering questions. Most of the questions were about Google
And Scoble has left MSN since then.
You have to think Yahoo’s 23% share (or whatever they are claiming) is of pageviews. Given the nature of their properties like chat rooms, Flickr, there recent Yahoo Questions offering and other community oriented things the number seems plausible. But as a search engine, Yahoo is not really anywhere, IMHO. I think Yahoo’s descent s similar to AOLs and Lycos’s; both very insular and “membership” oriented. There’s nothing wrong with that model, but if you expect your revenues to come from PPC ads it doesn’t seem to work. Google just puts it out there.
Tom