Just a random point in space on the current round of Search Wars (III, by my counting… I was from 93 - 99, won largely by AltaVista, and II was the rise of Google over all).

The latest Media Metrix search market share numbers put the market share of search as 46.4% Google, 30.5% Yahoo, and 15.5% MSN. I’m counting AOL’s 9.9% share for Google, as Google powers AOL. The rest is Ask, InfoSpace (MetaCrawler, DogPile, and others), and others.

OK, these seems reasonable.

However, if I count the search referrers to my blog (most going to my Unlock AudioVox 5600 instructions post), then I get the following:


754 Google
93 MSN
54 Yahoo


In percentage terms: 83%, 10%, 5%.

I’m going to do some more digging… I’m in the top 3 results for all engines, so it can’t be a “Use MSN / Yahoo, fallback to Google” pattern. But really, are we saying that people looking for hard / esoteric stuff use Google THAT dominantly?

What really surprises me is the Yahoo number. I could believe (or make up) lots of reasons why the distribution for MSN is so low compared to Google… customer skew being what I’d guess (MSN has different customers than Google, and they tend not to be the type to go unlocking an AudioVox). But Yahoo being only 5% is just… well… weird. That’s really, really, really low…

Bloggers out there: if you have ‘em, I’d love to know what your referrer counts are! Here’s a quick one-line command if you’re on a linux / apache system (in /var/log):

zcat `/bin/ls -t access.log*gz | head` | cat access.log access.log.1 | egrep -v 'tide[0-9]*.microsoft.com’ | awk ‘{print $11}’ | egrep ‘google|yahoo|msn\.com’ | sed ’s/.*\(google\|msn\.com\|yahoo\).*/\1/’ | sort | uniq -c


[Update]

OK… so I thought that perhaps one reason for skewing is that perhaps Google rates my site overall very highly, MSN not so much, and Yahoo hates me. Or maybe Steph’s still mad about that dinner… Anyway, looking just at my unlock page, we have:


94 Google
2 MSN
0 Yahoo


Yow.. OK, so MSN has a 2% share there, but 0 for Yahoo? That’s just kinda bizarre… more later on what those Yahoo folks ARE looking for… although doesn’t seem to be much. Weird.

Just a quick update… for the astute, you’ll notice I’ve removed the links to the Rolling Duffel Project from my Unlock AudioVox page. They haven’t updated since mid-September, and so I’m assuming they’ve done what they could and have moved on.

However, I’d like to thank everyone who has donated to something for Katarina, especially those who chipped in to the Red Cross, Human Society, and Habitat for Humanity. If you haven’t, and you’re still feeling guilty, click on the links below and feel less guilty… just because FEMA botching things is yesterday’s news doesn’t mean people and pets have homes now.

I’d also like to talk a bit about the PETS act campaign that the Humane Society is helping to promote. You can see the latest congressional info on the Thomas site for HR 3858. So far, it’s got 40 co-sponsors from both parties.

This is good stuff, and I’m pretty sure a no-brainer like the above will sail through (who wants to go into the 2006 election as being anti-pet?). But it also got me thinking… what happens to pets when you have to evacuate in case of an emergency, be it a hurricane, wild fire, earthquake, or another Bush being elected to the White House? I can even remember most of the check-lists I went through in Boy Scouts (yes, I’m an Eagle) to make the emergency survival kits. 4 gallons of water per person per day (this was Utah, so we assumed desert). Non-perishable food for 3 days. Blankets, whistle, first-ait kid, etc etc.

What about an extra leash for each dog? Portable water bowl? And extra food / water for the dog?

How about space preparation? If you have to pack up the car, how much space will the dog take up? Or dogs? Cats?

And what do you need as far as first aid for your pet? Here’s one dog first aid kit, apparently given to the Cincinatti Police. The Humane Society also has a pretty reasonable pet disaster planning list.

For giggles, here’s FEMA’s Survival Kit Check-List. Again, here we assume no pets… no crate for the cat, and some extra kitty litter. No spare leashes for the dog. No extra tags for the dog either. Go team.

I suspect I’m like most of you, in that I barely have a first-aid kit, let alone a disaster kit to toss in the car as we head north / south / east to escape whatever. Hopefully I won’t procrastinate too much longer in putting something together… and I’d encourage you to do the same. Perhaps I’ll make it my New Year’s Resolution and knock off an easy one!

Anyway, here are the links to the Humane Society and Habitat for Humanity… please give what you can.