Disclaimer: SEO Theory is not associated with Quantcast.com and the SEO Theory real search market share report is an estimate based on data provided by Quantcast.com for free through its Web site. Quantcast.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 Quantcast’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 Quantcast 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. In late July the July Data was adjusted to include several of the omitted search services. Gigablast has yet to qualify for inclusion in this report.
Beginning this month, percentage of market share is being included for Algorithmic search. The percentages are derived from the total estimated visitors included in the report and do not reflect actual market share (which would include many more search services that receive fewer than 100,000 visitors per month). The July percentages should not be compared to the August percentages because the July estimates do not include all the listed search services.
The report is divided into three tables: Algorithmic Search, Directory Search, and Blog Search.
| July Rank |
August Rank |
Domain | July Visitors |
August Visitors |
July % | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | Google.com | 137,051,286 | 136,000,000 | 36.33% | 34.88% |
| 2 | 2 | Live.com | 93,336,552 | 92,000,000 | 24.74% | 23.59% |
| 3 | 3 | Search.yahoo.com | 53,138,372 | 59,200,000 | 14.09% | 15.18% |
| 4 | 4 | Ask.com | 35,165,522 | 35,100,000 | 9.32% | 9.0% |
| 5 | 5 | Snap.com | 11,912,086 | 15,700,000 | 3.16% | 4.03% |
| 9 | 6 | Nextag.com | 6,499,125 | 14,700,000 | 1.72% | 3.77% |
| 6 | 7 | Search.msn.com | 8,876,260 | 8,700,000 | 2.35% | 2.23% |
| 7 | 8 | Search.aol.com | 8,172,712 | 8,100,000 | 2.17% | 2.08% |
| 8 | 9 | Dogpile.com | 6,668,770 | 4,300,000 | 1.77% | 1.10% |
| 10 | 10 | Search.mywebsearch.com | 3,330,990 | 3,200,000 | 0.88% | 0.82% |
| 11 | 11 | Aboutus.org | 2,629,297 | 2,600,000 | 0.70% | 0.67% |
| 12 | 12 | Altavista.com | 2,283,129 | 2,100,000 | 0.61% | 0.54% |
| 13 | 13 | Search.com | 2,107,499 | 1,900,000 | 0.56% | 0.49% |
| 14 | 14 | Mamma.com | 1,809,966 | 1,800,000 | 0.48% | 0.46% |
| 15 | 15 | Alexa.com | 1,752,971 | 1,500,000 | 0.46% | 0.38% |
| 16 | 16 | Cuil.com | 870,173 | 703,800 | 0.23% | 0.18% |
| – | 17 | Msxml.excite.com | - | 621,871 | 0.0% | 0.16% |
| 17 | 18 | Search.lycos.com | 643,777 | 607,000 | 0.17% | 0.16% |
| 18 | 19 | A9.com | 377,765 | 336,300 | 0.10% | 0.09% |
| – | 20 | Hotbot.com | - | 333,700 | 0.0% | 0.09% |
| 20 | 21 | Search.netscape.com | 132,362 | 120,920 | 0.04% | 0.03% |
| 21 | 22 | Ixquick.com | 128,820 | 116,200 | 0.03% | 0.03% |
| 19 | 23 | Hakia.com | 202,757 | 111,500 | 0.05% | 0.03% |
| 22 | 24 | Clusty.com | 108,214 | 106.900 | 0.03% | 0.03% |
| July Rank |
August Rank |
Domain | July Visitors |
August Visitors |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | Business.com | 6,083,709 | 6,300,000 |
| 2 | 2 | Dir.yahoo.com | 3,132,742 | 2,600,00 |
| 3 | 3 | DMOZ.org | 2,096,178 | 2,000,000 |
| 4 | 4 | Chiff.com | 634,728 | 696,300 |
| 5 | 5 | Joeant.com | 578,613 | 485,200 |
| 6 | 6 | Directory.google.com | 355,822 | 214,400 |
| 7 | 1 | Ezilon.com | 157,681 | 136,400 |
| July Rank |
August Rank |
Domain | July Visitors |
August Visitors |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | Technorati.com | 2,940,095 | 3,200,000 |
| 2 | 2 | Feedburner.com | 2,001,020 | 1,800,000 |
| 3 | 3 | Blogcatalog.com | 834,983 | 719,100 |
| 4 | 4 | Blogsearch.google.com | 432,504 | 435,500 |
| 5 | 5 | Bloglines.com | 334,493 | 281,300 |
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.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Mark 09.12.08 at 1:51 am
Thanks Michael for this informative post. Here in Australia Google’s market share is reported by Hitwise to be around 88% (from google.com + google.com.au). GA reports a consistently similar figure (around 85%) for SE traffic from Google, with Live in 2nd place at around 5% for most of my client sites.
So I’m confused. IS GA using the same erroneous metric that Hitwise or Neilsen/Netratings use to get their high figures? Up to now I’ve sorta felt safe to ignore the other search engines, but what we get measured on ultimately is client revenue from the website (bots don’t buy) – your figures mean I am making outcasts of 60+ % of potential visitors. This is a Big Deal.
Michael Martinez 09.12.08 at 7:56 am
Google Analytics does not recognize all the traffic your site receives. Nor does it recognize it all the search engines that send traffic to sites as search engines.
But you should also keep in mind that people tend to use search engines to look for different things. In the United States, Google appeals to the technical and gadget-friendly people; Yahoo! and MIcrosoft appeal to entertaintent and news-friendly people.
If your site doesn’t appeal to another search engine’s core audience, you should not expect to see much traffic from that search engine.
Then again, if you have not done proper research for other search engines’ traffic and optimized for that traffic, you’ll see underperformance.
In effect, many SEOs create self-fulfilling prophechies for their sites: “We won’t get much traffic from Microsoft so we won’t optimize for Microsoft. [Six months later] See? We don’t get traffic from Microsoft.”
You don’t get what you don’t work for.
In the United States, Microsoft’s search engine is the second most visited engine after Google. Those people are going SOMEWHERE, so just because a lot of SEOs say they are not getting traffic from Microsoft doesn’t mean Microsoft should be ignored. It means the vocal SEOs are either not providing Microsoft’s visitors with interesting content or they are not optimizing for Microsoft.
If Google were really driving 70-80% of all search traffic, the other search engines would not have so many visitors. How many queries people run on Google says absolutely nothing about how many people find something to click on in Google.
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