What is Google's real market share in the US?

Not many people realize this, but wikipedia makes all their stat information public. http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOrigi... As a top 10 site with a pretty broad appeal I'd say they are one of the best gauges of internet users.

Google represents at least 90% of search engine references coming in to that site.

Is that a global number or just the US? If global, is it possible to segment to US?

> That seems high indeed, but everyone I talk to "in the wild" who runs high traffic sites actually sees a much higher percentage of their search engine traffic coming from Google, usually from 80-90%.

Wouldn't the people that Gabriel Weinberg talks to be people who run websites much more likely to be frequented by the highly tech literate? Seems like a fantastically biased data set.

> I think the answer is that Yahoo and Bing have a much higher rate of navigational queries - queries like [facebook] or [twitter.com] that are just the name of a site. This class of queries does indeed send a much higher proportion of their traffic to a small number of sites.

> This makes sense if you think about it. The sort of person that searches on non-Google search engines is very different than the sort of person that searches on Google. People who search on non-Google are much more likely to generally not understand the internet. They are likely to just use the search engine that was preinstalled when they got the computer. They are likely to not understand the difference between a URL bar and a search box. And they are likely to only use search for typing in the name of a site and directly going there.

From observing non-tech savvy people using the internet, what I've found is that a lot of times, they know about Google and use it when they want to consciously make a search. But when they just want to access a site, they will type just the name of the site into the URL bar, which with modern browsers increasingly results in a search.

This method of searching uses the default search engine, which is often altered from Google even in browsers like Chrome due to these non-tech savvy people installing various software that changes the default search engine. But when these people want to do an "actual" search, they literally go to http://www.google.com/ and type in the search query there.

What's interesting is that a lot of times, they'll accidentally search with the default browser search instead, and they don't even realize that they're not using Google, which leads me to believe that they don't realize that there are different search engines, or that depending on whether they use their browser's default search or go to http://www.google.com/, they will get different search results.

I would be really interested to understand what goes through the minds of these people when they use the internet, because these sorts of things just scream out at me when I watch them browsing the web, but they seem to be completely oblivious to it. I just don't understand how they can miss the completely different site layout and URL.

The article mentions "What makes this even weirder is Hitwise also recently came out with a report saying Bing/Yahoo users click on more links than Google users." This is a metric that Hitwise calls success rate and they say Yahoo has the most successful searches.

I did a debunk of Hitwise's "success rate" metric back in February: https://plus.google.com/109412257237874861202/posts/A7d5joZ3...

In essence, I don't think Hitwise can tell a the difference between a click on a search result vs. just going to a different site. So doing a search and then leaving looks just like a success to them. For example, yahoo.com has a "Trending" box in the top-right of the page, and clicking on Rose McGowan will do a Yahoo search. If the user goes anywhere after that search, I believe Hitwise will call that a successful search. Likewise on msn.com, if you click many of the links, e.g. "Pencil skirts that will turn heads" that actually does a search on Bing. I believe going anywhere else on the web afterwards will again look like a successful search to Hitwise. I think a large amount of casual browsing on Yahoo/MSN is counted as "successful searches" by Hitwise.