I thought I’d take a quick look at the search landscape and see how things are shaking out. Data comes from Hitwise.
Plus, who doesn’t love charts?
No surprise here. We can see that the ad campaign lift for Bing has petered out and they are back where they started. See, the problem is that for you to keep increased market share, you have to have a decent product. Or at least improved. Long story short, no surprises here:
It’s good to see Ask hanging in there despite them also spending money on TV advertising instead of improving their technology. The following type of list is always interesting to me. Some sick traffic below.
But my favorite is next. Top search terms. On the Internet.
Clearly there is no basement on stupidity. Equally clear – companies cannot assume they do not need to optimize for brand terms simply because they have a short/memorable domain. Whether it is laziness or habit, users are still going to search engines to access well-known brands as opposed to typing a URL into their browsers. For these users, access to a brand is dictated not by the familiarity of their domain, but by the brand’s SERP home page.
Allow me to throw a few other anecdotes at you.
The average number of searches per month per user on Google? 74.
Total Google searches per day? 350+ million.
Share of toolbar searches? Google, of course, #1 at 60%.
OMMA came out with a neat little “search engagement” or search conversion data measure which simply shows the percentage of total users to a site who conducted a search on said site. Here’s the numbers:
Google: 93.5%
Ask Network: 86%
Yahoo Sites: 68.8%
Time Warner Network: 63.6%
Microsoft Sites: 47.2%
That’s it for today. We’ll be back with more scintillating search tidbits soon.
