How many people start searching by going to a search engine.

[sithicus]

Does anybody know roughly the number of people who start browing the web by going to a search engine.. or what the % of people is that the first thing they do is go to a search engine?

[hunderdown]

Roughly, most.

And the percentage seems to be going up. Probably varies by topic and demographic, though, so general statistics or other people's experiences may not apply to your site....

At my site, a niche information site, once I exclude repeat visitors coming via bookmarks and internal referrals, I'd estimate that 90% of my traffic is from search engines.

[PatrickDeese]

I would guess that a large majority have their home page set to someplace like Google or Yahoo - so they start nearly every browser session with a search.

[hannamyluv]

I have read that 80% of users end up at a site due to a search engine. (That fact came out of a Forrester Research study, but I can't find it at the moment.)

[SEOMike]

about 90% of people that visit my personal site arrive from the search engines. Since I do no marketing for my site, most people arrive by searching on one of the subjects I cover extensivley. My site actually does pretty well for a very minimal effort.

My clients get 85%+ of their web traffic delivered either from the "natural" listings or from the advertisments. So I know most of their visitors found them from the SEs. Others are probably returns / responses from OPT IN mail lists.

[lZakl]

This is from the official poles from a search engin class that I took.

Right out of the book:

Audience Reach Percentage (ARP) Defined: The percentage of the entire internet audience reached by a particular search engine or search directory over a 30 day period. An ARP of 1 percent would indicate that 1 percent of the total internet audience utilized the search site AT LEAST ONCE within the last 30 days.

ARP for the following sites are

Google 32%
Yahoo! 29%
MSN 27%
AOL 18%
Ask Jeeves 10%

These numbers are HUGE! That means that 32% of ALL THE USERS ON THE INTERNET pretty much use google on a regular basis. Now granted they only have to visit google once every 30 days, but realistically, how many people surf the web and make searches once a month? If you look at the numbers, they add up to more than 100% also, meaning some people use muliple search engines for their searches.

Just my .02¢

-- Zak

[GaryK]

Maybe this is a little off topic but I have to wonder how many of those people have a search engine as their start page/home page because they want it that way?

[dauction]

"67% of daily global Internet users arrived at Web sites by "direct navigation", defined as typing a URL into a browser address bar or using a bookmark - rather than through search engines and Web links"

websidestory