How to gauge actual SE usage.

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Over the past two months I've been trying to promote my website through pay-per-click and "sponsorship" programs with various search engines. In trying to decide on which search engines to submit to, I went with the ones having large numbers of incoming links. Many SEs allowed "free submits" in exchange for a cross link. Then one day it occurred to me, "Wouldn't it be possible to have a search engine website running with 50,000 inbound links, but which virtually nobody uses?" -- and the answer is yes -- they may have 49,000 links just from people who've provided a return link for a listing, with only 1,000 from other search engines, and from that, maybe one hundred people in the whole world are using the site on a regular basis -- your exposure on that search engine is essentially ZILCH! I didn't know of any way to tell what the actual usage is for a given SE, so I thought I'd see what inferences could be made from the number of times a search engine name is entered as a search query. To start, the word "google" (in one month) was typed into the search boxes of the major SEs 27 million times. I once read an article on an unrelated subject where the author needed to give a few examples of the ineptitude of some computer users and he gave the example of "the number of times people type 'google' to get Google." Of course, the number of people who actually type "google" is in a narrow range, and if he'd thought of it as a behaviorist, he'd see that the people who type this word are comprised of first-time computer users along with a majority of experienced users who, for one reason or another, are away from a computer that has Google bookmarked, and log onto the Internet on one where Google isn't bookmarked -- so they have to enter it manually. Yes, "google" was typed 27 million times in a month which shows that people are using Google wherever they are, wherever they can -- Google also has a stupendous 222 million inbound links. I counted the number of times an SE name was entered as a query to somehow gauge the usage of a SE. Then I made an index that shows the "density" of usage, (the number of queries in a month divided by the number of inbound links, expressed as a percentage). The bottom line is that the number of times the search term is entered is the rough indicator of how well used a particular search engine is -- does anyone know of an accurate or direct way to see how many times a given SE was used for a search?

Here are some statistics of 20 directories within four SE networks:



** Even though Jayde.com has nearly a half-million incoming links, the number of search queries for "jayde" had more to do with precious "jayde stones;" search entries that relate to the Jayde website were miniscule (below 100 in a month).

! 11,679 queries for "aesop" in a whole month -- around 10,000 in the same period for "aesop fable," so, nearly as many people were looking for stuff on the ancient Greek author "Aesop" as there were those looking for the Aesop.com Web site -- still, 32% is a very good ratio in this little study.

# MaxPromo.com has 810 links but, in an entire month, nobody typed this phrase into a search box, nor did anyone enter "metawebsearch."

& The query "best-searchengine" drew absolutely no references to the actual site -- none of the 97 hundred people who typed this phrase (or something similar) were looking for the Best-SearchEngine.com website -- they were actually looking for "the best search engine," and it seems that though they named the site to match what they saw as a fairly common search phrase, it appears that none of these 9700 people found the best-searchengine.com website either.

# All these are dismally low at less than 200 queries.

@ As I've learned in the WebProWorld Newsletter of March 2, 2005, the name "Overture" has been changed to "Yahoo Search Marketing Solutions."