The holidays were kind to Google and AOL but not so for the rest of the pack
Written by Jeremy Crane (contact - e-mail) -- January 15th, 2007 |
Share - Save - E-mail
It appears that the perennial holder of the fifth spot, AOL, may have turned the corner back in August. AOL search market share has improved for the past 4 months. Unfortunately for AOL there’s a pretty substantial climb to get back to year ago market share levels. Perhaps it’s time to dust off those acquisition/sale rumors … Yahoo? Microsoft? … Anyone?
The only other positive story in December is really just more of the same. That steady monotonous grind you hear is Google continuing to crawl up the market share hill. With each point gain in market share that Google tacks on, common wisdom would have it that it should get harder and harder for Google to continue its growth. Oddly enough the current trajectory hasn’t shown much in the way of diminishing returns. This is despite the dooms day cries of many a search and internet pundit. We shall see.
The holidays certainly were none too kind to the rest of the pack. The biggest “month-over-month slide prize” goes to Ask who as you may remember we’ve been following with some curiosity regarding their offline efforts. Ask just barely managed to eek out a December 2006 market share higher then that of December 2005. After the big slide in November, Yahoo again tipped downward losing only a slight amount of market share but losing none the less. Does anyone think Yahoo’s going to put any effort into building market share after they redeploy post Panama launch? I hope so … for Yahoo’s sake.
Search is often touted as being one of the best measures of traffic in and of itself. We put that to the test with out top-10 list this month. For this search report we’ve decided to take a look at the online retail “searchscape” having just put the holiday season behind us. Looking at the top-10 retailers searched for on the major engines is pretty interesting. In the chart below we’ve ranked the top ten retailer related searches**. They are ranked in relative order according to where they appear in the overall list of search terms used in the market on each of the engines. Then we compared that to the relative ranking according to each associated sites unique visitors.
For the most part search term use tends to correlate with overall traffic. There are a couple of notable differences however. Both Amazon and Sears did not fair as well in search results as they do in overall traffic. This raises a number of interesting questions. How are Amazon and Sears getting more traffic then their search query occurrences might suggest? Perhaps a topic for another day …
* Search market share includes web search only and is calculated based on unique queries within each session during the given month. A unique query is defined as unique user, search engine, and term with no double counting for repeat queries within a session by the same user. Compete tracks the 20 top search engines. For more information please contact Compete.
** Includes all standard variations ex. toys r us = toysrus, toysrus.com, toys r us.com, toys-r-us, and toys r us
Get SnapShot’s of sites mentioned in this post:
Did you like that post? You'll love these.
- Google Continues to Cool; Everyone Looking for That Youtube Thing
- Google Hot but Cooling; Ask Up then Down then Up
- Sunnyvale and Mountain View…so close, yet so far
- November 2007 Search Market Share: The Market, Google, and Yahoo! All Break Search Records?
- December Search Market Share: Holiday Bargain Hunting Supercharges Search, Closes a Year of Google Gains
Done reading? subscribe: To get an automatic feed of all future posts subscribe here, or to receive them via email enter your email address in the box in the right column.
Link to This Post:
Get the 
January 16th, 2007 at 12:35 pm
In regards to Google’s rate of growth as measured by its search market share… Google doesn’t derive revenue (directly) from people performing searches on its site. Their revenue comes from the power of the AdSense network which leverages millions of affiliates to display their ads. Maybe (and this is purely conjecture) there is a squared (or some other higher order) relationship between revenue generated through the selling of ad space to searches performed on its site. This would explain the lack of declining growth in the face of slowing market share growth.
What would be interesting is to see an analysis of how many click throughs happen on ads that are alongside their search results versus ads that are placed through the affiliate program. This could help explain where Google truly derives a majority of their revenue. Is it possible that searches on the Google site are almost irrelevant to revenue generation? Has anyone done such an analysis?
January 16th, 2007 at 4:32 pm
Lots of people probably go to the Amazon site itself for searching, but is it the same for Sears?
January 16th, 2007 at 5:45 pm
I’m always up for commenting of search stats :)
If my understanding is correct you are correlating a search for a website name with their over all traffic.
Eg, How many people search for “Amazon” compared with how many people search for “ebay” compared with their relative traffic.
It doesn’t show how much of all search traffic results in a click through to an Amazon or Ebay page. It would be interesting to look at those numbers (if you can produce them). Then we would know if (for example) Amazon gets a lot of traffic due to it’s emails, blogger links, etc or if it is just that they rank more highly for searches other than their company name. For example I suspect you are much more likely to find an amazon link when searching for “Harry Potter” than a link to an ebay auction. That would be my guess as to why there appears to be a discrepancy, but it would be interesting to see data backing it up.
To put it in another way, I suspect sites like amazon get more traffic through searches for specific products rather than people searching for the site itself.
January 16th, 2007 at 8:54 pm
Just an observation, but it seems odd to me that Dogpile would rank above Yahoo and MSN. Likewise that Yahoo would be below ask.
Something is strange — these don’t jive with other statistics I’ve seen. What exactly is being measured?
January 16th, 2007 at 8:56 pm
Nevermind, stupid me. This is trends only, not absolute rank. Duh. — sorry about that.
January 17th, 2007 at 9:04 am
ctkach: The short answer to your question is “yes” we do this type of analysis all the time. Understanding Paid vs. organic clickthrough is key to understanding the effectiveness of any search strategy. This is typically a bit more involved and specific then we tend to get on the blog here. All that said though I’m adding that to my list of potential future post topics. Thanks… I’ll make sure to give you some credit if I ever get around to writing it up.
Philip B: Right … I find it really interesting that so many more people are ending up going directly to Sears or getting their through some other link. Amazon makes sense since based on the online branding they have established … Sears not as much. Of course that’s just me.
James Brunskill: I couldn’t agree with you more. Amazon’s higher traffic numbers relative to domain specific searches are explainable. Clearly Amazon and eBay focus their efforts from a search marketing perspective on product key word buying. As you pointed out here I’m not measuring that here at all. I’m just looking at the number of people searching for Amazon vs. the number of people that go to Amazon. You would be surprised how many people search for destinations on the web. Just scanning the top-100 terms for each engine the vast majority are full URL searches. As I mentioned to Phillip B, do you think this same concept applies to Sears? Maybe … a quick search on “Craftsman tools” does bring up Sears in the #1 paid slot.
Jeff: No worries … everyone is entitled to one of those. Actually to be honest we’ve had a number of people comment on this same issue. As a result we’re going to start issuing actual market share ranking statistics in addition to trends. Hopefully this will make things a little more clear.
Thanks for all the great comments guys … keep ‘em coming.
June 22nd, 2007 at 2:29 pm
Free Video Clips
tymology The office was established in 1587 and was abolished by
January 2nd, 2008 at 11:07 pm
moviepost.cok
April 2nd, 2008 at 2:55 am
application card citibank credit
April 2nd, 2008 at 2:39 pm
jouer au poker texas
April 2nd, 2008 at 4:55 pm
www casino net
April 7th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
poker superstars online spielen
I start with giocare roulette casino poker
April 8th, 2008 at 11:37 am
internet craps
We holdem poker regeln free casino games
June 19th, 2008 at 7:37 am
jack black spiele
Regarder metodi roulette maquinas tragaperras paginas internet download free hindi ringtones tlcharger gratuitement de poker free suncom ringtones
May 20th, 2009 at 7:39 am
de, - Sunday, February 22, 2004 at 11:47:29 (PST)
October 30th, 2009 at 8:52 am
i think In browser fight, AOL is down but not out.Instant messaging,where AOL maintains a huge lead in market share, is the latest high-profile example. …. Hollywood hunts The Pirate Bay.Intel these days takes more market share.
poquer