What is Google's real market share in the US? • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by epi0Bauqu » Sun, Aug 14, 2011, 12:14 AM UTC

jessriedel wrote: post #30

epi0Bauqu wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I have no idea who you talk to, but I'll say this: just because you target your website at the general public doesn't mean that your user bases isn't significantly slanted toward techies. It's not just the subject of a website that can bias is like this; it can just be their size, or their newness.

You can generally tell by browser share breakdown as I mentioned in the post wrt to statcounter.

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

#32

Post by jzawodn » Sun, Aug 14, 2011, 1:13 AM UTC

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 used to work in Search at Yahoo! and can say that you are correct.

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

#33

Post by trotsky » Sun, Aug 14, 2011, 4:11 AM UTC

I saw traffic numbers $HUGE_ISP last year and google was pulling almost 85% in search. That was by number of bits shifted, not impressions - I'm not sure how that would change it.

If you're really interested, I'd reach out to sandvine. They are on net at several majors and they gather tons of information and are allowed to share it. They might take some time out from writing breathless press releases about netflix traffic to kick you some numbers, all good publicity. I think volume on a large national ISP is likely to be a much better metric than trackers.

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

#34

Post by wisty » Sun, Aug 14, 2011, 6:14 AM UTC

jordanlev wrote: post #14

w1ntermute wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 b…

What is going through your mind when you type "gm" and then hit autocomplete? It's a memorized task.

Do you wonder how DNS resolves? Do you wonder how the certificates are validated? Do you know what's in your .pem file? Who cares? It works, right?

Maybe you could make it more efficient, with some launcher program. But tasks that are memorized are easy to do (from a cognitive perspective), so you don't bother trying to improve them.

The human brain can be the laziest organ in the body. Well, it can be hard working, but in many cases it gets crazy blind spots, and gets stuck at a locally optimum point.

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

#35

Post by w1ntermute » Sun, Aug 14, 2011, 12:06 PM UTC

jordanlev wrote: post #14

w1ntermute wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 b…

> 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".

I think a more accurate analogy would be taking a different route to work and not even realizing it.

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

#36

Post by dakotabatt » Tue, Aug 16, 2011, 4:30 PM UTC

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'm in sales and it just cracks me up when I see sales people who are selling a technical product do the stuff you pointed out. It is just a crackup and I try to show them there are better and faster ways to do things...Like opening multiple tabs vs. opening 4 or 8 browsers... And if you show them they forget. It is amazing.....