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.