US Search Engine Roundup

According to Hitwise, the internet analytics company, Google is slowly gaining popularity in the US, whilst other search engines are falling. Between July 07 and the same period last year www.google.com showed a 4.12% increase in traffic currently standing at 64.35%. Search engines like Yahoo (under search.yahoo.com) and Ask (under www.ask.com) stayed pretty much the same with a decrease of 0.41% and 0.08% respectively.

The biggest mover in a downwards direction, unsuprisingly, was from the Microsoft search engine msn.com with a drop of 2.98%. There is a footnote on the Hitwise site where they point out that the msn.com results are composed from searches on www.live.com, search.msn.com, and even some traffic from a promotion on club.live.com. So even though they have results composed from 3 different sites, as well as searches from search boxes inbedded into IE7, they still can’t get people to use their product. I think this proves which search engine is the better! I would be interested to see the search statistics for UK only search engines.

Hitwise use a different approach from normal analytics. If you haven’t heard of them before they don’t measure toolbar traffic (like Alexa) or on site traffic (like Google analytics) they monitor direct internet traffic via ISP networks. Therefore, there traffic analysis is probably a lot more reliable than Alexa, and doesn’t rely on secret on-site statistics .

Phil
Programmer, Research and Development

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