SEO Blog

Google is the search engine of choice for people at work and at school. That’s what it looks like when you look at the number of visitors sent by the various search engines to a wide array of sites as seen by Enquisite. Last week, Richard Zwicky posted a chart representing traffic driven by various search engines in the month of December. (Search Engine Marketshare - December)

During the first three weeks of the month, Google commanded over 75% of search directed traffic. In the final ten days of the month however, Google driven traffic declined significantly.

Over the course of the month, Google’s trend-line goes down 10% from 78.43% in the first five days of December to 69.63% in the last five days.

Three other search engines shared that 10% rather evenly. Yahoo drove about 3% more search traffic over the course of the month. MSN was responsible for about 2% more traffic and MSN Live gained 1%. 3% of the remainder is spread thoughout minor gains shown by Ask, Comcast and MyWebSearch.

Interestingly, about 2% of search traffic shifted towards image search engines Google Images (1.5% increase) and Yahoo Images (0.5% increase).

I suspect the decline in Google driven search traffic is easily explainable. People use Google to search for work or education related information. In many cases, their work and library computers are set with Goolge as the browser default home page.

The home computer, however, is a more social environment used for Chat, email, personal shopping and banking, and personal interest web surfing. Many of these people will use Yahoo or MSN chat and will therefore be more likely to use a search feature associated with their social applications.

Another spike in MSN and MSN Live usage could be thought to come from new computers opened and installed around Christmas time however MSN’s biggest gains came in the week before Christmas with steady gains shown in the remaining ten days.

It will be interesting to see if these numbers represent a greater trend and can be sustained into the coming weeks. What if that 10% continued to use Yahoo, MSN and MSN Live instead of returning to Google when they return to school and work?

Are there any lessons for search marketers to learn from these numbers? The one glaringly obvious lesson is simple. December is likely to produce more significant opportunities at search engines other than Google.

Another lesson to learn is the increasing power of image search. Two percent of all search traffic driven through the (almost absurdly) massive network of sites Enquisite analyses represents tens of millions of searches conducted over a month.

A last lesson learned is that there is life in places one would not expect to find it. As Richard noted in his post at Enquisite, “…people still use AltaVista!” Not only do they use AltaVista, they also use Dogpile, Netscape, Comcast and MyWebSearch.

Actually seeing MyWebSearch was rather disappointing because to me, that indicates a high number of “browser search assistantce” software present on home computers. This type of software is purposefully designed to look like an organic search tool but is in fact a product that delivers paid-for results.

There are also lessons for the search engines in these numbers. I was surprised Froogle did not produce stronger numbers. Yahoo Shopping didn’t produce enough traffic to make this list though it a few references were noted by Enquisite.