Yahoo vs. MSN and Google

Yahoo, MSN and Google are sites #1, #2 and #3, respectively in the Alexa Traffic Rankings. (Link to Top 500.) For as long as we have been tracking traffic on the Web Yahoo.com has been in the number 1 position and continues to this day to get an impressive daily reach of 30% of the Internet audience. (Link to traffic comparison graph.)

But is Yahoo's position at #1 secure? MSN, with the boost given to it by Internet Explorer, which defaults to msn.com as the home page, is close behind Yahoo.com with a daily reach of 28% of the Internet audience and growing.

Bringing up the #3 slot is Google with daily reach of 22% and growing fast. If Google's current trajectory holds up it should be neck and neck with Yahoo.com within a year.

But that's not the whole story. Comparing yahoo.com with google.com masks a lot of hidden details and only tells you how one Internet portal compares with another. What a lot of people really want to know is how Yahoo's search traffic compares with Google. For that we are going to need to look at Alexa's traffic details for yahoo.com. In the section labeled "where do people go on yahoo.com" you will see that search.yahoo.com accounts for only 9% of Yahoo's traffic. In other words, Yahoo's venerated position at #1 has very little to do with its search traffic. In fact, if you were to break out Yahoo's search traffic from Yahoo as a whole you would find that it has a daily reach of less than 3% of the Internet audience. MSN is in a similar situation with search.msn.com garnering only 7% of MSN's total traffic.

So, when comparing Yahoo MSN and Google the truth is that Google, not Yahoo, is tops in the search game by a wide margin.