Altavista passing up Yahoo

[mahlon]

Lately AltaVista has been gaining and is now passing up Yahoo for my SE referrals. Is anyone else noticing the same trend?

[EliteWeb]

Not I :) AV is still non-existant in my logs compared to the others. I hope soon it gains more popularity!

[Macguru]

No, not me.

I have sites with top five in both Yahoo! and AV. The later is less 15 % of what Y! brings home.

Did you compare positions in both?

[mahlon]

Have not compared anything, this is what I have for yesterday 5/12,

1 Google 217 65.55%
2 AltaVista 52 15.7%
3 Yahoo 40 12.08%

[Macguru]

Comparing SE positions with referals let me compare oranges to oranges. It is perfectly normal that a second page position gets you at least 40 % less referrals than a first page position.

Also, a single day is some very slim margin to draw conclusions on. Does your AV referals include bablefish?

It is possible that a single user used the bablefish feature of AV to surf trought your site to 'translate' it to his mother tongue. It this case you can get a 'new' visitor for every page view.

What stat software do you use?

[mahlon]

Web Trends, I did not know all this, glad to be getting informed!

[mburgess]

It could also be your target audience and your product? Demographically, maybe your audience uses AV over Yahoo? Just a guess!

[JamesR]

Altavista has been steadily gaining ground on Yahoo for me. Interesting comeback.

[jeremy goodrich]

(thread moved)

That seems interesting to me. I think the keyword trends can be very search engine specific. I've noticed that for our keyword sets, altavista produces nothing, despite decent rankings.

[backus]

This for me:

Google 32%
MSN 25%
AltaVista 18%
Yahoo 6%
Mixture of others for the rest.

This is how it was three months back:
Google 28%
MSN 20%
Yahoo 8%
Ask Jeeves 5%
UK Plus 3%
Altavista 1%
Mixture of others for the rest.

<added>Although we do extremely well on AOL, no-one searches for our keywords, so we rarely get referrals..

[chris_f]

Second best search engine referrer.

Google 2463
AV 972
AllTheWeb 534
Yahoo 512
MSN 389
Lycos 217
ASK 198
INK 9

This is for 12-May-2002 (before FAST f****** up the updated and has cost me alot of money)

I can't believe I'm top in INK and it only brings in 9 clicks. :(

[backus]

We also run a free Smilies Search Engine. These are how our stats stand:
Yahoo: 3864
Google: 2388
MSN: 2319
AltaVista: 1731
AOL: 352

We have almost perfect placements for AOL.