Record Number of Searches

[Brett_Tabke]

[ecommercetimes.com...]

Google's 5.65 billion U.S. queries placed it at the top of the Web ferret pack for the quarter, followed by Yahoo, with 4.65 billion queries and a 30.4 percent market share; MSN, with 2.39 billion queries and a 15.6 percent share; AOL/Time Warner, with 1.41 billion queries and a 9.2 percent share; and Ask Jeeves, with 934 million queries and a 6.1 percent share.

While Google's market share increased from the first quarter, when it was 35.9 percent -- as did Ask Jeeves' share, which climbed from 5.3 percent, and AOL's, which jumped from 9.1 percent -- Yahoo's share dropped from 31.2 percent and MSN's from 16.3 percent.

[aleksl]

7_driver: I am not seeing too many people saying "Hey - we get loads more traffic from MSN/Yahoo than from Google."

Hey, we get loads more traffic from MSN/Yahoo than Google.

Especially since G$$gle started making banning / bashing / dup-context-misidentification / 301-redirect-highjacking / juggle-results-to-make-webmasters-pay-for-traffic changes.

Hmm...that's US queries. Since Google dominates some other markets as well, in reality they are still ahead...still...

[JuniorOptimizer]

Referring URL: Hits: Graph:
search.yahoo.com54.16%1491
blockedReferrer 13.26%365
search.msn.com 9.84%271
www.google.com 5.74%158

That's 2 days of stats on an entertainment based website.

[s_clay]

For our ecommerce niche site, MTD 7/19/05:

Total Visits - 10,000

Bookmarks: 50%
Google: 39%
Other: 27%
MSN: 20%
Yahoo: 14%

We rank about the same (1st page) on all engines for our major terms, with a slight hangover from burbon.

[Kirby]

The problem with posting log stats as proof is that we dont what you are comparing. Unless the page is #1 for the same query across the board, logs stats are meaningless.

[Swebbie]

"Hey - we get loads more traffic from MSN/Yahoo than from Google."

I do. We have several first-page rankings at Y and MSN, none at Google. I see increasing traffic from both engines - so much so that I don't miss Google traffic at all. I'd love to get some, but not getting much hasn't hurt me none. :)

[nzmatt]

It is all very strange - I just can't rectify these stats with mysite's stats:

Overall

bookmark - 60.9%
engines+links - 39.1%

Out of the Engines:

Google 75.4 %
Google (Images) 12.7 %
MSN 4.6 %
Yahoo 3 %
AOL 2 %

Most indexed is MSN (2500 pages), then Google(1500), and Yahoo hardly at all(32).

Best in SERPS is MSN(#1 for most main keyphrases), then Yahoo(#9), then Google(#14).

Is my AwStats not working? Weird.

[ncgimaker]

Adding up the various domains:

Yahoo 44%
MSN 19%
Google Search 0.2%
Google Adwords 0.5%

The rest are all direct, other smaller search engines, links, redirects from scrapers etc.

Does anyone have numbers for Prefect & Google proxy fetches vs user visits and also for Google 'Site Search' vs regular searches?

[HopeSeekr]

I run a huge ecommerce site, that has hundreds of thousands of unique visitors a month.

We were the first in Texas with a website (over 10 years ago) and maintained top listings in Google for over 4 years (1999 - 2003) for hte very competitive industry (roughly 10x harder than gambling). The ex-webmasters caused the sister site to be blacklisted in March from both Google and Yahoo (it has been unbanned since from Google). Our google referrals have dropped 15% every month since January, yet at the same time, Yahoo and MSN have increased 10 - 20% every month.

Our breakdown in referrals is as follows. Remember, this is for hundreds of thousands of visitors in a *very* competitive market and thus is a pretty good sample. Just google, MSN, and Yahoo percentages are in parenthesis.

Google: 29.3% (37.9%)
Yahoo: 27.3% (35.2%)
MSN: 20.9% (27.0%)
Ask Jeeves: 4.4%
Others: 18.0%

As you can see, my results closely match the results as above. None of my personal + non-commercial sites are like this, however. One runs at a staggering 99.97% google (50,000 searches v *four* in MSN and 20 in yahoo) mainly because all of the opensource browsers used by users of my site have google as their default search engine.

[edited by: vitaplease at 6:26 pm (utc) on July 20, 2005]
[edit reason] no url drops or specifics please... [/edit]

[webdude]

Kirby,
I would even take your statement a step further and say that even if you are #1 across the board, it doesn't seem to matter.

One site that is #1 for competative phrase on all three...

google 57.82%
Yahoo 21.07%
MSN 16.46%

Another site that is #1 for competative phrase an all three...

Yahoo 47.79%
Google 28.11%
MSN 20.88%

Go figure. Maybe people who buy green widgets go to Y and people who buy red widgets go to G :-)

[ergophobe]

I don't know about that Kirby (message 2).

I have the feeling that the "Google's sky is falling" feeling is a little like the "Microsoft's sky is falling"... circa 1995. I think it's happening in the same way and will happen faster, but like MS or IBM, it's not going to fall overnight. Perhaps at the moment, it isn't even in decline, it's just that its acceleration is slowing. Its market share may continue to rise for a while yet, but I'll bet it's nearing its zenith as a search company.

I don't think it actually has anything to do with whether or not Google returns better results - I don't think it does return the best results for me, but I'm still using it more than anything else... go figure.

It's more that it is literally becoming the MS of search. Google *was* cool, now it's mega-corp X. Everyone still uses it, but increasingly people find Google not "doing no evil" but rather getting sort of annoying, trying to take over everything. We see copyright complaints, the gmail controversy, the sense that Google is buying up everything, and so on all chip away at the Google cool. Google is perceived as a burgeoning empire, once undeniably good, now graying.

Not too mention that Google was once the place where search mattered, but that seems to be getting as dilute there as it has at Yahoo!

[RichTC]

The market share confirmation looks well odd to me in the UK. I just dont see MSN and Yahoo providing anywhere near these figures.

Ive held top rank 1 positions in MSN compared with top 20 in google and Google can still send about 8 times the traffic.

As far as im concerned in the UK, Google is the Daddy.I recon its more like:-
Google 70 %
Yahoo 12%
Aol 8%
MSN 7%
Ask 3%

[shor]

Read my first message in the thread.

Number of queries!= actual traffic

Quoted for emphasis. Search engine referral statistics are a different set of metrics from the number of search engine queries performed.

Example: A Yahoo user might make 10 search queries before finding your site, while a Google user clickthroughs on their first query... you still report 1:1 referral ratio.

[Lord Majestic]

Example: A Yahoo user might make 10 search queries before finding your site

But is Yahoo _that_ bad then? I don't use it often, but they seem reasonable, certainly not 10 times worse, MSN is better than Google on a number of queries (and I don't mean here my site being on top!)

[Swebbie]

Google was clearly providing the most relevant returns until a few months ago. It steadily has degraded since - SURPRISE! - they went public. I use MSN almost exclusively now. Their SERPs are the best, at least for all the things I search for. Bye bye Google. Enjoy your stock price now, before Microsoft makes you their b****.

[sit2510]

>>> Google's 5.65 billion U.S. queries placed it at the top of the Web ferret pack for the quarter, followed by Yahoo, with 4.65 billion queries and a 30.4 percent market share; MSN, with 2.39 billion queries

====================

Is this stats missing the big cake?

When combining worldwide with all Google.com and Google.co.xx, Yahoo and MSN are both still hundreds mile away from Google. In my opinion, this stats counts only for Google.com and not including worldwide, but for Yahoo and MSN, it looks like "worldwide" is included. That's why the figures are quite close to one another, but in reality, most of us (not all) know or feel that they are not at equal stance.

[gmiller]

Of course, another possible explanation is that Google users click on more of the links on a single results page. That could mean that Google returns a bunch of good results, or that the top results in Google are terrible. Either way, it would cause Google to generate more referrals on a given number of searches.

Frankly, we can sit here speculating about this for the rest of 2005, and it won't tell us anything useful.

[ncgimaker]

Example: A Yahoo user might make 10 search queries before finding your site, while a Google user clickthroughs on their first query... you still report 1:1 referral ratio.

Doubtful, probably the exact opposite. It means for each search they are clicking through several sites until they find what they want.

If they were searching multiple times to find the site, then they would have to be able to determine if the site is correct from the tiny snippet (without clicking).

But without the missing information you can't tell. For example if Google puts prefetch on an average 1 link that are never clicked by the user, then thats 10% extra referrals (because Firefox has a 10% market share). Also site searches skews the numbers too.

Even so, the perverse thing is that the more times people click back and click on a next link, the more views of the adverts Google gets and the more chance to make profit from the user clicking the adverts.

Its the big problem for Google, they don't get the 'profit-drop' feedback until they've skewed the results so far that people desert their results in large numbers.

[voices]

How many webmasters use google to search for and check their own rankings? To search for and check the competitions rankings. I know I do and I don't do it often at Yahoo. This is basically junk traffic to a search engine. It's bound to inflate their score.

[DumpedbyG]

These stats surprise me, I never thought Yahoo would be so close behind Google.
Based on what I hear, and my log files, I thought Google's results would be at least two times higher than Yahoo.

Based on my log files Google's result would be at least 1/10 of Yahoo:)

[ScottD]

voices, perhaps we should do more checks on our ranking in other engines - maybe thats what we should learn from this. I've just discovered that we've fallen a lot in Yahoo, and we're number one in Ask Jeeves. Go Ask Jeeves.