

What is Google's real market share in the US? - pardo
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2011/08/what-is-googles-real-market-share-in-the-us.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+yegg+%28Gabriel+Weinberg%27s+Blog%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

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lacker
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 seem to confirm this. One example is here:
[http://blog.alessiosignorini.com/2010/02/average-query-
lengt...](http://blog.alessiosignorini.com/2010/02/average-query-length-
february-2010/)

I'm sure they're not perfect, but let's assume these numbers are reasonable.
Single-word queries are a decent proxy for navigational queries. 27% of
Google's searches are one word, but 54% of Yahoo's searches are one word. So
if you were measuring on any site that didn't get one-word traffic, you would
see Google's searches overrepresented by 1.5X already.

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.

~~~
w1ntermute
> 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.

~~~
jordanlev
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".

~~~
wisty
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.

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Matt_Cutts
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...](https://plus.google.com/109412257237874861202/posts/A7d5joZ3tJJ)

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.

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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%.

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seanalltogether
Not many people realize this, but wikipedia makes all their stat information
public.
[http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOrigi...](http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOrigins.htm)
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.

~~~
jellicle
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....

~~~
ashishgandhi
If I'm looking for an article on something and Google thinks Wikipedia is one
of the solutions it displays it amongst OTHER results. I click on it because I
tend to like their articles.

I say the stat is what the stat it says it is. Wikipedia visitors tend to use
Google more than other search engines to get there. I personally Google
something with "wiki" thrown in as a keyword at the end so I can get to the
correct Wikipedia article.

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trotsky
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.

------
dennisgorelik
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?

~~~
sondh
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...

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jessriedel
> 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.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Nope, the people I was referring to for the most part run sites targeted at
the general public not techies.

~~~
jessriedel
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.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
You can generally tell by browser share breakdown as I mentioned in the post
wrt to statcounter.

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minikomi
Would like to see the equivalent of Japan ... Yahoo.jp has a ridiculous market
share here (especially amongst the pre-smartphone market - which is huge).

Edit: best I could find was from 2009 which puts yahoo at 51% over google at
39%[1]. However, google seems to be partnering with yahoojp to help them
improve their search technology[2].

[1][http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2009/3/J...](http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2009/3/Japan_Search_Engine_Rankings)

[2]<http://www.asahi.com/english/TKY201012020342.html>

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bauchidgw
well on most SEO conferences there is the agreement that a good search
optimized site gets at least 90 % from its search traffic via google in the us
market.

in other western markets (i.e. germany) google has a market share of 98% plus
and we are fine with it.

said that, one of my sites only gets 28% of its search traffic in the us
market via google, but it has a penalty on most of its pages (everything but
the startpage and its blog is banned from google and with good reason) so its
an outlier.

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vaksel
as far as anyone is concerned Google does indeed have a monopoly on
search...Bing spent something like 150 million to bump their share by a few
percentage points

And it's not like Google's product is that much better than Bing...the
difference is really miniscule...but that's the problem...Google is good
enough so to beat them you really need to bring something truly revolutionary
to the table

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nextparadigms
Is it just me or is Hitwise acting pretty aggressively/misleading against
Google lately? It started last month with some of their Google+ stat numbers,
and it's been at least 2 more such cases lately.

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kenjackson
IMO, there is little question that Google's search numbers are higher. This is
one reason why I think US antitrust probes are more justified given some of
their actions (not saying they've done anything wrong necessarily, but
prudence is advised).

This also explains why MS search revenue is lower than expected. People don't
click ads in navigational searches.

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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%+

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powertower
According to Google Analytics, Google is 97.3% of my search engine traffic.

~~~
usaar333
Tech heavy site?

I'm doing 98.3% Google here. (ignoring the mysterious search engine called
'search')

------
earl
Traffic sources for the last calendar month as measured by GA: [google, yahoo,
bing]

my blog about R, bash, and whatever crosses my mind: <http://blog.earlh.com> :
[1.4k, 9, 9]

my gf's blog about her life and our dog: <http://danceswithcorgis.com> : [877,
37, 14]

edit: see also acangiano's blogs:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2881340>

