Bill Lancer from Hitwise gave a great presentation on some important changes in search. They have a blog at www.ilovedata.com and track traffic from over 1600 search engines. First of all Google is BIG and only getting bigger! They currently make up 4.8% of ALL internet usage. This is an amazing number if you think about it. They have a breakdown of Google’s traffic by their various sites. Search is #1 and makes up 70% of their traffic. But YouTube is now their #2 traffic generator at 10% of all Google traffic. After that is Google Images. A few months ago Google implemented the “Universal Search” results in which they mix in maps, videos, images, news and other sources into their global search results. This has greatly impacted their traffic mix. Google maps is seeing 20% more traffic over the last 30 days due to this.
Human search has been a hot topic as of late. But the first human search shows up at spot 400 in the search engine list. That is ChaCha.com. So in other words “nothing”! The top 4 search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN/Live, Ask) make up 98% of all searches. So the others are hardly worth the effort.
Social networks now make up a large amount of traffic. The interesting thing is that the increase in social networking traffic has not effected the search engines at all. Social networking are unique in that they do not rely on search engines. They now have numbers that show that many people participate in multiple social networks. The increase in facebook traffic has not effected myspace traffic for example.
Facebook is touted as the next Google. There has been a ton written about this and there is lots of hype around facebook right now. My boss Paul Allen has a great facebook post. Facebook has had 2 major turning points in their traffic. The first is when they opened their site up to corporate networks. The second was when they opened their site to all users. Facebook now accounts for almost 2% of all web traffic! It is amazing to think about.
It is also interesting to think about how users start their web experience each day. In the beginning there where large portals like yahoo and netscape. This is what people used as their start page. Then people moved to using a search engine as their starting point. Now users are moving to social networks as their starting point. This is one reason they are growing so quickly.
There are some major differences in the demographics of each of the major search engines. Google has more males and they tend to be technical. One interesting stat is that extreme liberal and extreme conservatives tend to use Google more (people with political views in the middle don’t use Google as much). MSN and Ask have more women searchers. Also seniors use MSN/Live and Ask way more than they do Google.
There are 60 billion searches per month worldwide and only 13 billion of them happen in the US.
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