Search Engine Traffic - A new measurable!

[pete]

We have had countless discussions covering the traffic that search engines send. Many have focused on the source of referrers.

When frequenting WebmasterWorld, I often find myself migrating to the forums which are of most importance to my business and livelihood. Seeing that most of our livelihoods are governed by driving qualified traffic, here's a fresh look at measuring search engines:

Search engines classified by topic popularity in the last two months

1) Google - 100 Topics (28.5%)
2)Yahoo! - 80 Topics (23.7%)
3) Inktomi - 62 Topics (17.6%)
4) Fast - 42 Topics (11.9%)
5) Dir. (Looksmart, ODP, About) - 38 Topics (10.7%)

Compare these to your logs and see how accurate this viewpoint is.

Havent included "Foo" because of the bias towards the celebrity status of R.C Jordan and the pulling power of his presence attracting hundreds of posts ;)

An alternative explanation to the popularity of "Foo" could be that we are all bored with search engines due to the current staleness!

(edited by: pete at 3:20 pm (gmt) on Nov. 30, 2001)

[Woz]

Never thought of that. Google is about twice that much for me but apart from that it's spot on.

Onya
Woz

[gethan]

One difficulty is breaking down msn - partial Ink and Looksmart.

Msn gives me as many hits as yahoo.

[FreeBee]

Interesting angle! Perhaps the other reason why there's so much emphasis on SE's other than Google is because many of us may be looking for that other basket into which we can place some eggs...