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

gabrielweinberg.com

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

#11

Post by seanalltogether »

epi0Bauqu wrote: post #4
seanalltogether wrote: post #2

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?

I believe it's global, but if someone wanted to do the legwork to determine US only, all the log files are uploaded on an hourly basis here http://dammit.lt/wikistats/

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

#14

Post by jordanlev »

w1ntermute wrote: post #8
lacker wrote: post #7

I used to work on search quality at Google, but I think I can answer this just using public information. ;-) 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. The available public statistics see…

> 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 per…

What goes through their minds? Probably something like "I want to see what my friends are up to" or "I want to post a picture I just took" or "I'm bored and want to play Farmville". They just want to accomplish their task and browsers/URLs/search engines/keyboards etc. are just a means to that end.

I could imagine a similar analogy would be someone who is a professional racecar driver or just really into cars would be driving on a road thinking "I'm going to ease into this turn, and stay close to the inside" whereas most other people would be thinking "I have to remember to buy milk at the store after I pick up Jimmy from daycare".

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

#15

Post by sondh »

dennisgorelik wrote: post #3

Could it be the result of Google lobbying for underestimating their search market share (due to antitrust concerns) and Yahoo/Bing are lobbying for overestimating their market share?

I don't think so (but your thought is very interesting anyway) because when Bing lobbies to get higher stats, they may get higher ads revenue but in the long run, particularly in the FTC investigation, they will run into bigger trouble.

But yeah, this is just my guess...

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

#16

Post by citricsquid »

I'll share some figures for some gaming sites from google analytics, these are global though, does anyone know how to narrow down by country with ga?

site a: 110m page views past 30 days, 51% Search engine traffic, google is 95%+

site b: 90m page views past 30 days, 77% Search engine traffic, google is 95%+

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

#17

Post by AJ007 »

lacker wrote: post #7

I used to work on search quality at Google, but I think I can answer this just using public information. ;-) 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. The available public statistics see…

I think the answer lies in several areas, yours probably explains 90% of it.

Other things:

-Comparison of average number of visits a month per unique user: Google-21.5, Yahoo-18, Bing-8.9

-From what I have seen with my companies own internal numbers, Yahoo & Bing users may be more inclined to click on search ads. Unless a webmaster is running a big ad campaign, they aren't going to see huge volume from these two search engines.

-What percentage of Yahoo's 140m monthly users are visiting the site to use Yahoo Mail verse to search?

I recommend using compete.com for traffic intelligence. It fairly accurately reflects my own site's data. I've been paying $500 a month for their lower premium tier for a good 2 years with no complaints for anything other than idiotic salespeople.

Another comment, as a webmaster comparing your percentage of traffic from one search engine verse the other is meaningless unless your rankings are exactly the same in all of them. A real test would have to be done with a PPC campaign strictly receiving traffic from google.com, bing.com, and yahoo.com

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

#18

Post by acangiano »

My programming blog gets 99.35% of its search engine traffic from Google.

AnyNewBooks.com: 96.44%

My math blog: 92.91%

OK, those are technical or for a tech savvy crowd. How about my wife's vintage blog which attracts mainly a non-technical female demographic? 84.08%. Or her Girl Guides' blog? 78.74%.

My father in law's local renovation site: 81.48%.

Not a single site out of a couple of dozen I've access to, shows anything less than 75%.

With these numbers at hand, I have a really hard time believing that Google's market share is anything below 75-80%.

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

#19

Post by jellicle »

seanalltogether wrote: post #2

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.

This is basically a measure of which search engine promotes Wikipedia links more heavily in their algorithm, not a measure of the search engine's market share....

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

#20

Post by acangiano »

epi0Bauqu wrote: post #9
jessriedel wrote: post #6

> 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.

Nope, the people I was referring to for the most part run sites targeted at the general public not techies.

Yup. See my comment about my wife's blogs above. Sites for absolutely non-technical audiences get 80+% of all their organic traffic, from Google.
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