Rich Skrenta, co-founder and CEO of Topix.net, is fed up with hearing low numbers for Google's market share when he reckons the real number is around 70%.
Let's start by agreeing that Rich is measuring something different: search referrals, rather than searches. However, referrals is actually a more important number, in reflecting successful searches rather than failed ones. (Who cares how many searches people run if they don't click on any of the results?)
Anyway, Rich writes:
I picked a basket of medium-to-large websites and looked at the inbound search traffic percentages using Hitwise. I included Topix in this mix, both because it's a representative content site, and also because I could double-check the Hitwise numbers against our own server logs and 3rd party measurements from Google Analytics.
The results give Google a market share of 70.6%, followed by Yahoo (18.7%), Microsoft (8.9%) and Ask (1.7%). The numbers may not be exactly right, but who doesn't think they are in the right ball-park?
Rich adds:
My favorite example (not included in the above stats): According to Hitwise, Yahoo blogger Jeremy Zawodny gets 92% of his inbound search traffic from Google, and only 2.7% from Yahoo. :-)
