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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.
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