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"Is this true?"
YES :)
Where is your evidence? This may have been true 3 or 4 years ago, but not in the past 2. If anything Google is now the "common man brand" for search, used by those who know enough about the internet to cut their umbilical cords to the training wheels of ISP and mega-portals. I accept however that many casual users use Y! or AOL or ISP home pages as their default page, usually because they have not worked out yet how to change it, are too lazy too, dont visit the web enough times to justify the move, or have not yet had the motivation to do so..
As others have said, Google results power AOL and much of Y! so in the end they are google results.
Yes, estimates range from 70% to 85% for the percetage of search engine results supplied directly or indirectly from Google.
>>Our office has Yahoo set up as the default page for everyone.<<
Better get them to change to Google. Then the workers will spend less time dredging through ads, paying yahoo games, and finally get down and so some work! What sort of industry is your company in by the way? Iid be interested to know the types of companies that set people's home page to yahoo.
You need a decent log file analysis of your web site.
Have a look at either the free counters of various sorts, or, if you can access your raw log files, look at the varios analysis software around,
Very true. But if you have to have Yahoo as your home page, then why not install Google tool bar as well and get both Yahoo and Google on tap?
Many of our clients use msn since their default installation of Windows has msn as their home page. I always disable it but alas there are just that much that I can disable given the time pressure that we are alway under.
I know of google from my isp's home page search option. Use it then because they return the most relevant results for anything that I search for.
Google lacks the clutter of mail, chat and other options which may not always be good.
Say no more.
2odd...
Searches Per Day ( February 25, 2003 )
------------------
Google 250 million
Overture 167 million
Inktomi 80 million
LookSmart 45 million
FindWhat 33 million
Ask Jeeves 20 million
AltaVista 18 million
FAST 12 million
But you are right, there are many people that just keep the default that was on the browser when they bought the computer.
We all pretty much know from our own log files that Google has about 85-90% of the se referrals today, and 95-98%+ of the FREE inclusion referrals. Any other figures but your own log files are dismissable.
This site is not in Yahoo directory therefore, all AOL searches and Yahoo searches are Googlified.
FYI it is also #3 in Alltheweb for 3 primary target terms, and #1 in altavista for its primary.
I created my site and optimized it according to google. Within the first index I was comming up #1 for several key phrases that I targeted. I'm generating sales on a daily basis and get about 600 total visitors daily - not bad for only 60 days. I'm making money and spending absolutely nothing on advertising - my only costs is the webhosting service.
With other search engines, my advertising budget would be huge! With 1$,2$ + clicks it only makes since that I choose google to go with. You simply can't beat it!
Askjoe
It is easiest to optimize for Google...because they have a sensible algo, crawl deep and update frequently. Thus all of us here are doing pretty well on Google. With other SE's it's pot-luck...sometimes you get listed well, and sometimes you don't...I think most of us here have given up optimising for the others.
Because we are doing well on Google, we get most of our hits from Google. It dosen't mean the other search engines are not used much. I know many people who use MSN, AJ, and miscellaneous portals powered by various SEs. But we all don't get much traffic from those 'cause we are nowhere on them.
Thus your log files are not a correct indicator of SE usage.
This is similiar to the classic mistake companies make; for eg., many retailers study what is being bought and keep producing more of that product thinking it is what is in demand...not realising, that there are other products that they don't stock which customers are buying from other shops.
I personally think, Google+AOL+Yahoo is not more than 50% of the query market. Though, this trio is responsible for 90% of my SE traffic.
Can we hear from users who are well listed on Inktomi,AJ and Google?
Think about it, how else would I compete with XYZ inc. with a million dollar advertising budget? I couldn't, but on google I can and even crush them.
Whether you're a business or a non-profit trying to get your word out - google gives you a platform to do so and reach a lot of people at a very economic price.
Askjoe
Definetly, Google is the largest contributior to traffic (as well as the deepest crawler)...but it is in the range of 40%-60% and not 70%-90% as some are suggesting.
What is interesting is that Yahoo is between 10%-25% and MSN is 7%-20%. With the coming switch to Inktomi for Yahoo, Inktomi, will be 17%-45%.
These stats confirm another theory of mine: Google is no.1 due to sheer muscle. They crawl deeper and more often. The other SEs are going to catch up soon, they have all merged and have the financial muscle to build the hardware muscle.
Here are the top 4 on my site:
Google 14982 69.1%
Yahoo 4279 19.7%
MSN 1027 4.7%
AOL 439 2%
As you can see Google+Yahoo+AOL= 90.8%
This is not considering google images with 40 hits, 452 from the toolbar, and another couple hundred from earthlink, attbi, att.net, comcast, etc. so it is probably around 95% google for my site.
I don't expect that percentage to stay that high. After 9 months online many of the other SEs have decided to finally deep crawl my site. Ink is the only one that ever even made it into the triple digits of pages crawled before this month.
Of course those percentages are for SE traffic. Bookmarks and link traffic account for more than 50% of my users. And I look forward to the day that they other engines can keep up with Google.
Exactly,look at two of the recent succes stories of the internet -GOOGLE & EBAY. They let the little guy compete.
How long until the big boys fight back? (wondering?)
patience and know-how to compete with the big boys - all of a sudden money is not longer a factor.
That's how it started..
They're warming up, big guns just tend to take longer to re-target.
We got it good with G, they're 'clean', but things tend to change, one way or another somebody will start trying to make big bucks off us.
Craig
I have a site which runs several PPC campaigns and is therefore better placed in searchengines other than Google for many terms. We still get 62% of search-engine referred traffic from Google/Yahoo/AOL (36% from Google itself)
Craig
We get 60% or more traffic from Google - but we have noticed that MSN has been REALLY coming up on all of our Client's websites!
I've noticed the same thing. Google is still my #1 referrer by a large margin, but MSN occasionally edges out Yahoo as #2, and it's close to Google for some of my more important keyphrases. (On one recent day, MSN actually provided more referrals than Google did for a keyword where I rank #1 in both search engines.)
If I could only figure how to get to 1-2 on MSN while maintaining it on G!
This is why I dont even bother looking at these SE's unless I am trying to impress a Client! :P
