Is Google losing ground?

A large increase in other traffic but not google.

[texasville]

I want to know if any one else is experiencing a marked increase in hits. I am. 25-30% in last 2 weeks. Very surprising as I expected a decrease. My site is not seasonal items. ALL of my increase is coming from Yahoo and MSN and NOT from google.
As I have never ranked well in Google, I have a hard time determining between it and other se's.

Are more people turning to Y and M? Or is anyone experiencing this upturn also and if so- are you getting it in google?

I am very curious as to whether this signals a change in se use.

[King of all Sales]

We operate an ecommerce site in the US and while Yahoo traffic has remained fairly consistant relative to Google, our MSN traffic has increased significantly.

We've also noticed that during the day on weekdays, the MSN traffic increases relative to Google. In fact, several times in early December, MSN traffic passed Google traffic.

My son thinks it's because MSN might be the default engine for a lot of corporate systems.

[europeforvisitors]

My ratio of Google referrals to Yahoo and MSN referrals is higher now than it's been in months.

I wouldn't draw any conclusions about each SE's market share based on that fact, though. It's more likely that I'm simply doing better in Google right now than I am in Yahoo and MSN.

[texasville]

King-

I agree with the corporate default. I've noticed the increase and drop off of MSN during business hours. But I am getting a large increase over that and also a large increase of Yahoo. Today, Yahoo almost doubled. I am just wondering if anyone is experiencing this and what their google numbers are looking like.

[cleanup]

Yes, I noticed some more refferrals from Y! recently.

Knowing what I do about Googles current indexing problems I tend to search Google first a couple of times but then quicky turn to MSN then Yahoo! if I don't find what I want. I used to just keep plugging away in Google.

Of course I don't regard myself as a representative sample but I have noticed that my habits are changing so perhaps others too are realizing that there are usefull alternatives.

[BillyS]

>>>My son thinks it's because MSN might be the default engine for a lot of corporate systems.

I work for a large company and the defualt is Google.

[HRoth]

I too have noticed a big increase in my traffic this month, but usually this month does begin my six "good" months of the year (a number of my products are seasonal). Still, it has not taken off this much this early before. I also have noticed that my proportion of Yahoo:Google traffic has increased. MSN traffic for me is more than it was but not enough to account for this increase at all. I have noticed that the percentage of people visiting from bookmarks has increased by 20% this month.

[tmartini]

Here are my observations:

Google Down (not surprising considering the current crappiness of their index)

Yahoo Up (seems to go up every time Google screws up their index, then goes down again once Google fixes it. Obviously Yahoo loves when Google screws up and the screwups seem to be getting more frequent.)

MSN Stable (still #3 for me and not generating any significant traffic)

-- T

[Eazygoin]

Well, if Europe gets off the ground with Quaero, the intended search engine for Europeans, its gonna cause a rumpus, as it sounds like a big time and serious future SE.
PC Advisor online has the gen on it.

Google is still my top SE, and streets ahead of the others, with MSN doing well, and Yahoo in 3rd place, with Ask very close behind!

[thecityofgold2005]

In the UK and with similar position on all 3 search engines, Google accounts for >75% of my SE traffic.

I doubt any 'European' search engine will make any ground in the UK. When a UK surfer searches they want results in English. I think the internet has made the US closer to the UK if anything.

[gstewart]

Quaero, the intended search engine for Europeans

The UK 'Daily Telegraph' reported last year that "French president Jacques Chirac yesterday pledged to help fund a new European internet search engine to rival Google and Yahoo as he railed against what he sees as the threat of Anglo-Saxon cultural imperialism"

Google and Yahoo must be quaking in their shoes..

[optimist]

The Google index is making it hard to find relevant sites for many terms, since the upping on the Authority domains the NY Times Classifieds, Monster.com and the NYSE are now the places to find "marketing companies in new york" according to Google.

So the issue here is applied semantics failing on authorities since the highlighted text seems to be market.

Just something to chew on...

[phantombookman]

Much depends on the area you work in, most of us base our comments on our experiences which are unlikely to apply universally to Google.

For example people call the serps, in my areas they are superb and streets ahead of Y and MSN

My biggest worry is that G dominate my sector, nobody uses anything else, I get more traffic from wiki pages than I do MSN and Y added together!

I am happy because I rank very well but if they drop a site it may as well not be on the internet!

[Phil_Payne]

Google is top here, but has definitely lost a certain amount of ground to MSN.

I don't trust statistics, but MSN have gone from: "Oh, yeah" to: "I must think about this."

I haven't done any hour-by-hour stuff - my bulk is hobby stuff anyway, so I'd expect early evening peaks. If there is a cause at my end, it's Google dropping the ball to an extent and having to adapt to some of the changes they've made recently. Personally I think the changes will benefit Google in the long term, but there was definitely a blip. I wish they'd kept their eyes on the ball and eschewed the video stuff.

[trinorthlighting]

MSN has always indexed me good, yahoo seems to be crawling my site a lot more this past month and are is updating their index frequently.

Google had definatly lost ground. Seems they have not updated their index. I see a lot of urls listed in their index for my site but no descriptions. Plus they keep fluxing between old and new data for some reason.