Ho John Lee’s Weblog

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.

David Hornik asks: Where’s the Money in the Long Tail?

It is certainly the case that in the aggregate, Long Tail content is extraordinarily valuable. The question for VCs and entrepreneurs is “for whom?”
…
The real money is in aggregation and filtering and those will continue to be interesting businesses for the foreseeable future.

He points out that aggregators are building convenient one-stop shopping for people looking for topically-focused content, and derive economic value even when the content publishers do not.

David Beisel follows the money a little further:

…in the long run, the value of the network is not only determined by the number of nodes in it, but in the ability for the network to monetize those nodes.
…in calculating the value of a network, any equation describing it should contain a variable with the monetization rate (or proxied by the value to the user which can be monetized in the future). So while the number of nodes in a network surely is a fundamental (if not the majority, in many cases) driver of value, the value of the network itself to the user is also a very important component to the overall total.

Wow! Although the basic idea is straightforward, crawling and indexing for a general purpose search engine requires huge resources. Web crawlers are effectively downloading copies of the entire internet over and over, turning them over to indexing applications which scan the contents for structure and meaning.

The sheer scale of the task is a substantial barrier to entry for anyone wanting to develop a new indexing or retrieval application. Some projects have narrowed the problem domain, which can reduce the problem scope to a manageable level, but this announcement from Alexa looks like it may offer an exciting alternative for building new search applications.

John Batelle writes: