Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
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.
Queries do not necessarily indicate number of users or an increase/decrease in actual "use" of the engine.
However what I am wondering about is the fact that Google is perceived (based on log analysis) as much better traffic driver than Yahoo and MSN taken together, even though the numbers imply that Y+M should drive more traffic then G.
Yahoo has so many paid listings over the organic results its amazing anyone clicks on them.
Yahoo has so many paid listings over the organic results its amazing anyone clicks on them.
Sure, three is more than the two that Google has, but I'm not sure I'd classify it as "so many".
backlink checkers
Yes, but think of how many auto-generated scripts (worms!) use Google too. I bet that number is far greater than backlink checkers on Yahoo. ;-)
I'm not on a tirade against anyone here, I just hate "number of queries". It's a really stupid metric.
Based on what I hear, and my log files, I thought Google's results would be at least two times higher than Yahoo.
However what I am wondering about is the fact that Google is perceived (based on log analysis) as much better traffic driver than Yahoo and MSN taken together, even though the numbers imply that Y+M should drive more traffic then G.
I find this point to be very interesting as well. Where is all of the traffic from those very significant percentages of marketshare going?
When we do a stats thread, it's much more common to find people who have G way ahead (as is the case on 3 of my sites). Am I missing something or do others see the same patterns?
Number of queries!= actual traffic
Google reports it's earnings on Thursday and the report will likely be full of these metrics.
Yahoo releases search query volume on keywords and phrases, (inventory.overture.com), while Google does not.
Is it logical to use market share data to approximate keyword search volume on Google, or across the search engine arena in general?
For example, if Yahoo reports that "green widgets" was queried 5,000 last month - can I assume that the term was queried approximately 15,000 times across all engines? (based on their approximate 30% market share)
[edited by: avi_wilensky at 6:16 pm (utc) on July 19, 2005]
I have run many sites and major traffic fluctuations are always due to changes in my Google rankings, primarily because the amount of traffic from the other search engines is so much less.
Also I think the majority of technical people tend to use Google and are less inclined to click on ads. Less technical people and people who use the Internet infrequently might use Yahoo more and may be more inclined to click on sponsored listings, further reducing the amount of traffic exiting through Yahoo's Web search results.
And Yahoo do have significantly more sponsored listings than Google. When I search for web design in Yahoo, I get 4 sponsored listings on top, followed by a Yahoo shortcut to another section of their portal, which actually looks like a listing. There are also 2 sponsored listings below the 10 web search results and several more to the right of the results. Basically, half links on the page are non-Websearch results.
Perhaps these points offer an explanation as to why they get almost as many searches as Google but webmasters dont get to see that level of traffic.
More searches could also indicate a fall in quality - users are now needing to issue multiple queries to find what they want. The converse could also be true.Queries do not necessarily indicate number of users or an increase/decrease in actual "use" of the engine.
Which could apply to any of the search engines.
One engines traffic could go up because searchers are quickly finding what they want, so they use that engine more often.
Another engines numbers could go up because it takes more tries to find what you want.
Number of queries!= actual traffic
True, but this implies _very_ different quality of search results. Personally I think MSN is better than Google in at least some searches, perhaps not on par overall but it certainly not twice as bad. The only reason I thought traffic from MSN is low because too few people use it.
Todays DMNews (I don't think there is a online edition):
"they generate more than half of all online referrals in the US and more than 90percent in some european countries".
It almost seems like people would have to be searching on MSN & Yahoo but not clicking anything. Google always blows away Overture for a similar paid keyword list and MSN + Y! search referrals on a given site rarely, if ever equal what Google sends.
<tongue firmly in cheek />
If it was just me - ok, that's just a single data point - but I'm not seeing too many people on this thread saying
"Hey - we get loads more traffic from MSN/Yahoo than from Google."
So where does all the MSN/Yahoo traffic go?
Based on what I hear, and my log files, I thought Google's results would be at least two times higher than Yahoo.
Well, it's probably skewed with lots of websites like mine: we get traffic mainly from Yahoo & MSN, not google.
Otherwise there should be a closer correlation with log-file results. Who is searching without clicking on the results? It doesn't make sense!
If Y&M don't send their searching users to a NUL device, all traffic landing stats prove that the above number of search queries is plain false, or that I can't interpret stats correctly.
Or do we discuss a Google understatement?
