Google is the most popular European Search Engine

BBC/Nielsen NetRatings: Engine of choice for more than 55 million Europeans.

[gethan]

From BBC [news.bbc.co.uk] and Nielson Net Ratings [nielsen-netratings.com] (can't find a press release yet)

Google: Audience of 55,641 million
MSN search: 27,151 million
Yahoo search: 12,676 million
Google image search: 10,275 million
AOL search: 5,846 million
Source: Neilsen/NetRatings

Nice to see some figures... the most interesting for me is the high prominence of Google Image search. Are you optimising your images?

[pagano]

From Italy.
I've tried some kind of img optimization on one of my clients last year ... but I didn't go deep into it.

Nice: in january 2004 stats, image search from GG and YH are around 0,18% of total SE referrers ...

[The Cricketer]

Don't the majority of people using Google Image Search just use it to find images that they can use/steal for their websites, or low quality print work?

Sure there are other uses, but I just don't get the impression that it generally helps us.

[foxtunes]

Certainly google is the first search engine port of call for a high percentage of limeys here in the uk.

[pagano]

I think that in some cases, savvy internet users may search on image search engines, expecially for certain market fields, and not only for steal imgs.
I remember that my past img optimization on that client came from that fact that I found a referrer from GG images in it's log file, and thinking about it I realized this: my client is a furnishing reseller, and it make sense that savvy internet users look for images of kitchens, bedrooms and so on.
IMO, in this case (for this kind of market field) it make sense.

[GoogleGuy]

Good find, gethan..

[vitaplease]

Some more data from France from estat/@position tracking:

[revue-referencement.com...]

according to them:

65% of French searches are done through Google

[revue-referencement.com...]

8,6% of the Google searchers want "only from France" results.

[revue-referencement.com...]

5,8 % use the toolbar (first toolbar data I've seen before)

[revue-referencement.com...]

80% only check the first page of Serps

and much more information there on those pages...

(not quite sure if number of actual searches and number of individual (unique) google visitors are seperated well though..leave that to the real French)

some 2002 data to compare... [webmasterworld.com...]

[rfgdxm1]

I like this from the BBC news report:

"For the time being though, Google is riding high. At the beginning of the year, its founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page joined the Forbes magazine list of world billionaires."

They are to the Internet what Bill Gates is to the PC. And, MSN is #2 on the market share list. Stay tuned for the clash of the titans.