SEO Tips | Where do people search?

You can search for Web sites at many places. Literally thousands of sites, in fact, provide the ability to search the Web. (What you may not realize, however, is that many sites search only a small subset of the World Wide Web.)

However, most searches are carried out at a small number of search sites. How do the world’s most popular search sites rank?

That depends on how you measure popularity:
- Percentage of site visitors (audience reach) Total number of visitors
- Total number of searches carried out at a site
- Total number of hours visitors spend searching at the site.

Each measurement provides a slightly different ranking, though all provide a similar picture, with the same sites generally appearing on the list, though some in slightly different positions.

The following list runs down the world’s most popular search sites, based on one month of searches during 2005 — 4.5 billion searches — according to a Nielsen/NetRatings study. These statistics are for U.S. Internet users:

Google.com 46.2%
Yahoo.com 22.5%
MSN.com 12.6%
AOL.com 5.4%
My Way 2.2%
Ask (AskJeeves) 1.6%
Netscape.com 1.6%
iWon 0.9%
Earthlink 0.8%
DogPile 0.9%
Others 5.3%

Remember, this is a list of search sites, not search systems. In some cases, the sites have own their own systems. Google provides its own search results, but AOL doesn’t. (AOL gets its results from Google.)

The fact that some sites get results from other search systems means two things.

- The numbers in the preceding list are somewhat misleading. They suggest that Google has around 46.2 percent of all searches. But Google also feeds AOL its results — add AOL’s searches to Google’s, and you’ve got 51.6 percent of all searches. In addition, Google feeds Netscape (another 1.6 percent according to NetRatings) and EarthLink (0.8 percent ). And DogPile is a meta search engine: Search at DogPile, and you see results from Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.
- You can ignore some of these systems. At present, for example, and for the foreseeable future, you don’t need to worry about AOL.com. Even though it’s one of the world’s top search sites, you can forget about it. Sure, keep it in the back of your mind, but as long as you remember that Google feeds AOL, you need to worry about Google only.