August 2008 Real Search Market Share per Compete

Disclaimer: SEO Theory is not associated with Compete.com and the SEO Theory real search market share report is an estimate based on data provided by Compete.com for free through its Web site. Compete.com has not endorsed this report. These traffic estimates may not represent actual unique visitor data.

Real search market share is measured in terms of estimated unique visitors rather than number of queries performed. Because of automated rank-checking tools (and manual rank checking), Google’s estimated search market share based on queries performed is heavily inflated and therefore an unreliable indicator of potential search traffic.

The following tables are based on Compete’s estimated unique U.S. visitors for the selected domains. Most of the domains listed here were included in the July 2008 Real Search Market Share report because Compete estimated a minimum of 100,000 visitors for each. Excite, Hotbot, Lycos, Mamma, and Netscape should have appeared on previous reports but were accidentally overlooked. Ixquick has been dropped because its estimated traffic fell to less than 100,000. Gigablast has yet to qualify for inclusion.

The report is divided into three tables: Algorithmic Search, Directory Search, and Blog Search.

Listings marked with an asterisk ( * ) are root domains whose traffic may be divided between search services and other services.

Comparing the Compete-based report to the Quantcast-based report

Compete’s data differs from the numbers reported by Quantcast. Hence, the rankings by Quantcast differ from the rankings by Compete. These Compete numbers don’t necessarily match Compete’s official search market share estimate.

Additional analysis

Something you can do with Compete’s data is look at the Visitors through four breakdowns: People Counts (total number of unique visitors), Rank (based on internal criteria), Reach (an estimate of what percentage of the Internet population can visit the site), and unique visits.

Compete also offers several options under Engagement: Daily Attention, Monthly Attention, Average Stay, Page Views, Pages per Visit, and Visits per Person.