Search Engine Usage Stats

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Search Engine Usage Stats

Source: Axandra Search Engine Facts March 9, 2004

Internet analysis service Nielsen/NetRatings recently released information about the most popular search sites in the United States, as based on audience reach.

Audience reach is the percentage of US home and work Internet users estimated to have searched on each site at least once during the month through a web browser or some other "online" means.

The results of the study can help you to decide which search sites could bring more visitors to your site.

The most important US search sites, based on audience reach:

Google 39.4%
Yahoo 30.4%
MSN 29.6%
AOL 15.5%
Ask Jeeves 8.5%

39 percent of active Internet surfers (or 59.3 million unique viewers) used Google to do searches. The search tools at Yahoo and MSN attracted approximately 30 percent each. Yahoo had 45.7 million unique users and MSN 44.6 million.

What does this mean to your web site?
It's obviously important to optimize your web pages for Google. However, the information also shows that you should not rely solely on Google.

Although Google might currently bring you the most visitors, you'll probably get even more visitors if you also optimize some pages on your web site for Yahoo and MSN. Ask Jeeves is also becoming more important.

Optimize some of your web pages for Google, optimize some of your web pages for Yahoo and optimize some of your web pages for MSN search to make sure that you benefit from visitors from all major search sites.

Make sure that your web site has many good incoming links. Google, Yahoo and MSN Search give good incoming links great value when determining the ranking of a web site. If your web site has good incoming links, it will get much better rankings than a web site without good incoming links.

What about European search sites?
Nielsen/NetRatings also released information about the most popular European search sites. The results for European search sites are very similar.

Based on audience reach, the most important European search sites are Google (47.3%), MSN Search (23.1%), Yahoo Search (10.8%), AOL Search (5.0%), T-Online Suche (3.7%), Voila Search (2.9%) and Lycos Europe Search (2.7%).

It doesn't matter if you target the US market or the European market: don't focus too much on Google. Although it's currently the major player, you'll get better results if you also take other major search engines into account.