4 replies to this topic

[JohnMu]

I keep re-reading Frank Shilling's blog post "Google, Yahoo and The Invisible Search Engine" ... I can't get enough (and am still not sure I agree with all the guestimations).

It refers to comScore Releases March U.S. Search Engine Rankings which has a table with search engine traffic for the top engines (just the data from March 07):

Google Sites 48.3%
Yahoo! Sites 27.5%
Microsoft Sites 10.9%
Ask Network 5.2%
Time Warner Network 5.0%
(Rest 3.1%)

Remembering that the Microsoft browsers default to MSN/Live for unresolving domain names (and Firefox defaults to Google), how much actual search traffic (people doing searches on purpose) does MSN/Live really get? Frank assumes that Microsoft only gets 3% (of the total) for actual search traffic.

Has Ask passed Microsoft?

Are there any numbers out there about type-in "searches" which do not resolve to domain names? Looking at the AOL database, I see quite a lot of it. But how can you tell which searches are people actually searching for something by entering a domain name?

John

[rustybrick]

Danny posted recent hitwise numbers on April 12th.

Ask.com is above live.com but not MSN.

[JohnMu]

Are there any numbers about the number of searches that were automatically triggered from typos? With IE7 / Vista when I enter "domain.cmo" into the URL bar, it automatically triggers a search. It would be neat to know how much of the market-share MSN/Live gets from there.

John

[rustybrick]

That I do not know.

[phaithful]

With IE7 / Vista when I enter "domain.cmo" into the URL bar, it automatically triggers a search. It would be neat to know how much of the market-share MSN/Live gets from there.

It's not just MSN/Live but it'll conduct a search for whatever search engine you've selected as your default (that's if you selected a different engine than MSN/Live).

Also, it's helpful to note that it's not just IE 7 / Vista that forces searches for NXDomain (non-existent domain). Many ISPs such as Charter Communications are signing up for these to improve user experience and monetization.

I have Charter cable at home, and I get Yahoo! NXDomain search pages.

Afterthought

Edit: Ooops disregard below, John already mentioned this in the original post

Also in FireFox, Google also captures searches from keywords typed directly into the address bar and conducts an automatic search even though your default search box in the upper right might be something else like Ask.

Edited by phaithful, 24 April 2007 - 07:06 PM.