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Not too many surprises, but it's nice that such a venerable web institution as useit continues to publish these stats every year.
At one point Nielsen reports...
Microsoft Network is getting to be big as a source of visitors. This is probably partly due to an increased customer base, but it must also indicate that MSN is better than AOL at letting users out on the open Internet and helping them find higher-quality content than simply the service's own walled garden. AOL is much bigger than MSN and yet lets a much smaller part of its users find useit.
Sounds reasonable. However, it would be nice if somewhere on the page he offered the caveat that all of these stats don't necessarily reflect the actual proportion of traffic delivered to the rest of the world by these search sites.
For the sake of argument, useit.com could be "friendlier" (better optimized or just easier to spider and index) to MSN Search than to AOL, so more people would reach useit.com from MSN Search instead of from AOL. This doesn't mean that MSN Search definitely accounts for more traffic to all web sites, just that it accounts for more traffic to useit.com.
That's one of the concepts I try to communicate to clients who assume that their sites' traffic history reflects the actual state of the web. YMMV.
"friendlier" (better optimized or just easier to spider and index) to MSN Search than to AOLI can't imagin how the site could be any "friendlier" to a spider than it already is. After all, it's almost all text: pure spider food.
I agree with shorebreak: interesting, thanks.
