Thursday, July 13, 2006

Search Engine Market Share

I occasionally run into charts of search engine market share from Nielsen, like this one, or from other expensive services like Comscore.

Is it just me, or are these charts a bit goofy? Does Yahoo really still have 23% of the search market? Is Google at less than half the search market?

I don't believe it. Any webmaster will tell you that Google represents almost ALL of the search engine traffic. Yahoo is nowhere near 23%. Just read the blogs, here, here, here and here and on countless other blogs.

So I decided to poke around Alexa's stats and generate my own search engine market share graph. According to my calcs, Google is at almost 85% market share. Yahoo is at 9%. This seems to mirror what I expected.

I'm not sure why the premier (read: expensive) services don't match what everybody sees in their logs...

What do you see in your logs?

Some notes about my calculations:
I am counting reach, not pageviews. I didn't count any international domains like yahoo.co.jp or google.de, etc. For Google I only counted google.com and none of the subdomains like mail.google.com and images.google.com. For Yahoo I only counted search.yahoo.com. For MSN I only counted search.msn.com. For ask I only counted ask.com and search.ask.com. For AOL I only counted search.aol.com. For MyWay I only counted mysearch.myway.com and search.myway.com.

Comments - Permalink

68 comments:

interneato said...

We see almost exactly the same data you do: 80+% Google, 9% Yahoo and a small % MSN, AOL, etc.

There might be a demographic reason that these services are skewed differently. That's what I've always suspected.

saskatoonscanner said...

Mine is 75% Google over the past two weeks of stats. I personally use way more search engines than most, Yahoo is a big part of that, Google is used as the base search engine but I always want to find new things. SASKATOONSCANNER.com's stats can be a bit unusual with some very long visits . People are watching it like they used to watch TV.

 Minutes    Visitors    Percent 
 <1   1,470   57.38% 
 1   259   10.11% 
 2   117   4.57% 
 3   74   2.89% 
 4   64   2.50% 
 5 to 10   145   5.66% 
 10 to 15   71   2.77% 
 
 120 to 180   46   1.80% 
 180 to 240   41   1.60%

The Savant said...

You got something wrong buddy, you just checked search.yahoo.com while most of the searches from Yahoo! are done through its homepage yahoo.com.


On alexa.com's traffic details for Yahoo!, there's this section "Where do people go on yahoo.com?" and if you've noticed only 9% of the total visitors visit this certain section of the site. Also the Nielsen NetRatings report clearly states that the searches done through any Yahoo-branded web site such as Yahoo.com or Yahoo Local excluding other Yahoo!-owned websites.

Come to think of it, Nielsen NetRatings can't be that wrong with thousands of advertisers looking closely at the search engines' generated traffic.

Geoffrey Mack said...

Savant, the thing I am trying to quantify here is the relative impact of the search engines on the rest of us, including Webmasters, bloggers, etc. The best way to do that is to count search result pages, where our sites appear and where people are likely to click and visit our sites. This is the basis for my comparison. Any other type of comparison misses the point. Who cares that Yahoo has more traffic if they only refer a small fraction of the traffic to my site compared to Google. That's the thing Webmasters want to know.

So, that is why I did not count Yahoo's front page. Search results don't show up there. Nobody is going to click to your site from that page. They are going to click to your site from the page where the search results are shown... on search.yahoo.com.

All that said, there is some bias in my calculations toward Google. I counted traffic to Google's homepage, when to be fair I should have not done so. But for the sake of ease I left it in because the search results on google are on the google.com domain. If Google were kind enough to show their results on search.google.com then we could do an easy apples to apples comparison. But they don't. Still, the net effect of my laziness is that Google is probably only overcounted by a few percentage points on my graph.

Harshad Joshi said...

Hi there. Even I have my two cents to offer in serach engine facts.

Like you mentioned, Google has got almost 85% of market in search engines.Apart from the PageRank, they also have some major factors that keep them on #1 position.

I conducted a small survey to find out some queries that have highest number of results in Google and MSN. After that, I selected the first site that appears(I am feeling lucky) and then used Alexa web traffic to find the site rank..The results were astonishing..

The sites marked by Google were having consistant better web traffic rankings over those sites marked by MSN. Infact, MSN showed a lot of inconsistant and irrelevant results, and many sites from MSN were not present in Alexa's database.

Apart from that, Google AdWords have got a definate edge over AdBrite and Yahoo! affiliation program. SO that also boosts up Googles revenues and service ranks.

So, in short, its clear that Google's 'Don't be evil' motto is still working, and according to me,and many net users, Google is the best option when it comes for Web Searching, and Alexa is the best engine when it comes to statistics.

Thank you.

BTW, I will be releasing the report soon for the interested ones @ THe First Tones of Freedom (http://agneya2.blogspot.com)

theRake said...

I definately do not see what these reports see. I do see MSN (Live.com) as growing in some of my blogs. Yahoo is not a major player, and Google is in the 75 - 80% range.

Like I said MSN (Live) is the fastest growing by percentage but still is less than 10% on http://birdflu.blogtopper.com

Ish Kumar said...

I guess MSN search market in not that minimum as they are shifting their search market from search.msn.com to live.com

and the healthy guess would be 5%(MSN)+7%(LIVE)=12% search engine market share.

Kanye2008 said...

I do feel lame because most of my traffic is from MSN. I have thousands of pages listed in MSN and Yahoo, but a few in Google...and my traffic is close to non-existent. Ahh well, what can you do.
Tony Rocks

Search Engines World said...

I look in my site: Top 10 Google - Yahoo - MSN Ranking, Google brings more visitors than another search engines. It takes 85% search volume and 83% referrer visitors.

Search Engine Hits Visitor Page Bandwidth
Google.com 8608 7536 186 553165388
MSN.com 1155 1032 68 279509000
Yahoo.com 288 251 42 8707088
Yandex.ru 185 176 13 4460264
Alexa.com 14 13 4 544347
Websearch.com 8 8 2 179917
Ninemsn.com.au8 7 4 352849
search.com 4 4 4 79004
Dogpile.com 3 3 2 153904
Altavista.com 3 2 2 250997
avantfind.com 2 2 1 37308
MyWay.com 1 1 1 27036
earthlink.net 1 1 1 102313
startpagina.nl1 1 1 15970
seznam.cz 1 1 1 25729
hotbot.com 1 1 1 23906
clusty.com 1 1 1 249
mysearch.com 1 1 1 1830

In Vietnam, almost people like using Google to find anything.

TeleportJobs said...

Over at TeleportJobs we actually see Yahoo in the top spot. Here's the breakdown:

Yahoo: 55.2%
Google: 37.5%
MSN: 6%
Altavista: 1%
Ask: < 1%
Infospace: < 1%

This information is coming directly from Google analytics. I'm thinking that the difference is due to content of particular sites.

TeleportJobs said...

Over at TeleportJobs we actually see Yahoo in the top spot. Here's the breakdown:

Yahoo: 55.2%
Google: 37.5%
MSN: 6%
Altavista: 1%
Ask: < 1%
Infospace: < 1%

This information is coming directly from Google analytics. I'm thinking that the difference is due to content of particular sites.

lugnut said...

Our video sharing site shows similar results:

Google - 75%
Yahoo - 15%
MSN - 6%
Ask - 2%
Search.com - 1%
AltaVista - 1%

buddingpoet said...

One big multi national corporate I know gets the following referrals:
Google 76.03%
Yahoo 16.87%
MSN 6.37%

Wolfy said...

There is one flaw in your thinking - Google is big enough that web masters are finding ways of cheating it to get their site better results on Google, but forget the number 2 player Yahoo.

So the chances of your site being found on Google as opposed to Yahoo is multiplied artificially.

I would also see it hard to believe because there is a whole opposite majority that aren't looking for blogs and technology-related web sites that are probably using Yahoo.

I believe that Yahoo is still a major force in the search engine share.

W. Andrew said...

I couldn't agree with you more. Google accounts for well over 75% of my traffic at The GATE, and on some days it's closer to 85%.

Yahoo comes in second, with MSN trailing just behind, although now and then MSN seems to jump (but this is due to popular stories in the news rather than basic MSN searches).

Craig Bellamy said...

when you say 85% market share, do you mean in the US or globally? 85% seems far too high for both the US or Globally. In Australia, Google represents 80% of our market, but we are only a small country.

Craig

FIDELIS SMITH said...
This post has been removed by a blog administrator.
John said...

I went back and scanned the results of my last 100,000 visitors (Cygnus-X1) and received the following search-engine results:

Google Images: 72.6%
Google Proper: 10.8%
Yahoo: 9.9%
MSN: 3.3%
Everyone Else: 3.4%

So it seems to be in line with your statement an no where near what that chart shows on average...

DHB Photography said...

I am about:

77% Google
18% MSN
5% Yahoo

Orikinla Osinachi. said...

On my posting of Alexa Traffic Rank for Nigerian websites on Nairaland, a respondent said:
"Any good programmer can manipulate the traffic to their web pages."

Is this possible?
Can a good programmer direct traffic to web pages?

God bless.

Weight Loss helper said...

We receive 65% Google, MSN 4.5% and Yahoo 1.7%.

About a year ago Yahoo was sending us about 30% but after an algo change it dropped to almost nothing. I believe yahoo has gone down in quality badly, in our market there seems to be too much spam and/or poor sites in the SE.

omicron009 said...

Your whole logic is completly wrong, you can't base market share off of how much traffic search engines bring your site. You might have page 1 listings on google and page 9 on yahoo, so obviously your going to get much more traffic from google. If the opposite happened you'd see yahoo at the top but that certainly does not mean yahoo has the most market share.

Its based of how many search are made on each search engine which is the ONLY accurate way to figure out how much market share a engine has. Terrible article

Eric Brown said...

I never understood the Neilson ratings either, the site traffic for my chair massage training website breaks down as follows:

Google 80%
Yahoo 11%
MSN 5%

Richard Akintokun said...

This seems like very interesting information. I just never used to bother with search engine stats in reagrds to my site. But this has definitely opened my eyes now.

Derrick Pallas said...

In respoonse to omicron009, the stats Geoff calculated are not based on how many refereals www.alexa.com gets from Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc. They were generated from our toolbar usage trail data regarding how many searches our toolbar users did on each of those sites. Geoff's point (and many people confirmed this) is that the aforementioned reports don't match what webmasters see and our users do.

bjandthebear said...
This post has been removed by a blog administrator.
S.E said...
This post has been removed by a blog administrator.
Global Car Japan - Exporter of Japanese Used Cars said...

Well, may be you are just taking into account of traffic only from English sites But there is indeed demographic variation which may be surprising. In a country like Japan it is Yahoo which is the dominating search engine. And website owners pay for overture keywords and Yahoo directory services there rather than google adwords.

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zql said...

hi,i'm a reader of www.hnol.net.
i just don't understand that why its traffic rank is higher than rednet.cn's while its name position lags behind the latter?

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Anonymous said...

They're all pretty interesting views & diverse stats, but would anyone just disregard a Nielsen & comScore based on the various opinions here? As someone mentioned, how much traffic a particular site gets isn't really an indicator of ANYTHING, except that stat itself. I run a company that provides IT support services in London and we get almost all search engine traffic, especially to our
UK web design page
and Network Security Services page through Google. In fact, since we optimised for Google (before we changed everything and broke it!), we got zero traffic from MSN or Yahoo. Does this mean that nobody uses MSN & Yahoo anymore? Certainly not!

blogiast said...

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Here's some useful info on com search page
which you might be looking for. The url is: http://www.jaldisearch.com/

Van said...

On a related note you may want to check out the Huckabuck metasearch.

This metasearch engine calculates your market-share of a search term across Google, Yahoo, MSN and del.icio.us search engines.

What's your pageshare?

Article describes the idea behind the engine and the algorithm used to calculate pageshare.

SJoshi said...

DoYell has launched a new search engine which caters to web-savvy searchers by ranking results based on what is important to the search audience. www.doyell.com is becoming very popular now days

Searching said...

In Vietnam, every one use Google search to seek them favorist information, products or services.
Almost use Google likes them home page. So, over 90 percents Search volume in Vietnam for Google.
Some one use Google PageRank and Alexa ranking methode to compare them quality websites. Now, Vietnam has about 10,000 PCs and Laptops have been instatlled them.
--------------------------------
Thiet ke website

Searching said...
This post has been removed by the author.
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Minutes Visitors Percent
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We see almost exactly the same data you do: 80+% Google, 9% Yahoo and a small % MSN, AOL, etc.
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