Re: Search Engines that Deliver

From: Michael Martinez <Michael_at_xenite.org>
Date: Mon 13 Nov 2000 16:48:53 -0500

C. ANTONIO ROMERO <romero_at_alumni.princeton.edu> WROTE:
> Now, here's my question: It makes sense that Yahoo!,
> google and altavista come in first in our traffic
> because they're the among most popular search sites,
> certainly. But what about the others? Are they low
> because those sites are correspondingly less popular,
> or because we have lousy coverage/ranking/placement in
> those sites? What are people's experiences with these
> matters?

Nobody gets as much traffic as Yahoo!, even though as
search services go Yahoo! and other directories have
very small databases. That is why they supplement
their offeringes with listings from other services.
Yahoo!'s recent alliance with Google has helped to
propel Google to the forefront of the search engines.

Fairly recent data
(http://www.searchenginewatch.com/reports/statmarket.ht
ml) suggests that in April of this year Yahoo! was
used for more than half of all searches performed.
Altavista was used for 18% of all searches performed,
and Excite, Go, Lycos, Snap (now NBCi), Goto, MSN,
Webcrawler, and AskJeeves all shared the rest of the
percentages in declining order.

Unfortunately, I don't have access to more recent data
on search services' actual usage, although my own
search engine referral data is similar to yours. This
is from a couple of weeks ago (I haven't had time to
check statistics recently) and only lists referrals of
500 or more for the week of October 22-28:

     1982 http://www.google.com/
     1578 http://www.altavista.com/
     1294 http://search.yahoo.com/
     1150 http://clubs.excite.com/
     1076 http://google.yahoo.com/
      899 http://my.netscape.com/
      745 http://search.msn.com/
      550 http://aolsearch.aol.com/

I include the listing at clubs.excite.com because it's
a directory of member-submitted links. For science
fiction fandom, membership in such clubs is important
if you want to generate referrals. My.netscape.com is
a start page service, and I have several XML channels
which are listed there.

Generally speaking, the other search services just
don't have the brand-name recognition that Yahoo! and
Altavista (and now Google) have. Inktomi, which
serves its data through 125 partners (or thereabouts),
used to provide the secondary listings for Yahoo!, but
now the closest they are getting to the top of my
referrals is probably the MSN statistic (MSN gets its
data from a variety of sources).

Generally speaking, each search service probably has a
core group of loyal users whose search patterns may
differ from those of other services' core user groups.
And one kind of data you won't find is what people are
looking for on which services.

So, generally speaking again, your numbers are probably
about average. You're going to get the most bang for
your buck from Yahoo!, Altavista, and Google in
today's search engine markets. But any of the
services in your list or mine are good to rank highly
on. You don't say what keywords you are targeting, or
how highly you are ranked. Nor do you say how long
the referral period was.

For all we know, your content is just not very popular
with surfers, or all those numbers represent a
1-minute sampling and your content is a hot topic
across the industry.

BTW -- I did not provide aggregate data. I have other
URLs for Yahoo! and AOL in my statistics, so their
overall referrals for that week were much higher than
what I'm showing here.

Science Fiction and Fantasy info_at_xenite.org
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http://www.xenite.org/special_events/vicky_shaffer.html
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Received on Mon Nov 13 2000 - 15:48:53 CST