|
I once had a person present me with a long
winded, yet passionate, diatribe about why AllTheWeb.com was better than
Google, MSN and…Yahoo! If I only had a brain, I would surely see that
AllTheWeb.com would become the dominant search engine. This I was told
with great conviction and more than a few people nodded their heads
around us. Since I was in a
particularly bad mood that evening, I hipped the person into the fact
that Yahoo provides all the search results on AllTheWeb.com! I even had
to pull the site up and show my "teacher" the truth of the matter. So
much for making friends!
Many people fall in love with a
particular search engine, which is fine. I do it myself. That doesn’t
mean the search engine in question is the biggest, baddest or best!
Subjective views are, well, subjective. Follow them in lieu of objective
facts and you run the risk of making huge mistakes.
Objective Numbers
There are two types of results you can
look at when calculating search engine traffic percentages. The first
represents the total traffic covered by a search engine across all sites
it provides results to. The second, which we cover here, refers to only
the percentage of searches actually on the engine itself. For instance,
Google provides results for AOL. In these figures, the AOL searches are
NOT included in Google’s totals.
For the first half of 2005, the
objective numbers were:
1. Google: 47 percent
2. Yahoo: 22 percent
3. MSN: 12 percent
4. AOL: 5 percent
5. Others: 14 percent
Short, sweet and to the point. Google
is clearly eating the biggest piece of the pie. If Google buys AOL, it
will grow even more. Conversely, if MSN buys AOL, it will move closer to
Yahoo.
When it comes to your marketing, Google
is clearly the beast you should focus on. It controls more traffic than
Yahoo and MSN combined.
|
