“Another consideration is that the higher the quantity then the more room there is for error or negative results. That may be why Google has a lower percentage of fulfillment than Yahoo. “totally agree, i made the same point, and 10% difference is quite good, since google doesn’t give preferential treatment to its own content like youtube videos and such.

“That indicates a little bit of a bias to me. Even if we accept Compete.com’s conclusion that Yahoo is more useful 75% of the time compared to Google’s 65%, and I have no reason to dispute it as a fact, then Google would still be right more times on the whole than Yahoo.” : you are disputing a fact with an assertion.

“Take note, 65% of 67% of the whole is a larger number than 75% of the 20% of the whole. So these statistics are very misleading.” : the statistic is the fulfillment *rate*, not about absolute numbers. if the report asserted that yahoo fulfills more searches than google, it would’ve been wrong. but they state that in relative percentage basis.

There are even more variables than you mention here spandana. You are right in what you wrote. Nothing wrong with your math.

But from the link you included, it says, “longer long-tail: google gets twice (or thrice, depending on whose number you believe) as much traffic”

The numbers the blogger is referring to is the number of searches done on google are more. That does not equate to more traffic. Traffic as in UNIQUE hits per day to google vs yahoo. I don’t think the number of unique hits to google is 3 times as much as yahoo even if there are 3 times the number of “searches”

I think the average google users searches many more times per day as yahoo users. More web-savvy users and those who have been on the web longer use google. more newbies use yahoo and they don’t search nearly as often as google users.

people go to yahoo for a lot more reasons than search. people go to google for other things but not in the same numbers as yahoo in my opinion.

So if a google user on the average searches 10 times per day and a yahoo user searches 1 time per day and google has 3 times the “searches” as yahoo, who has more “search users”?

Thank you all for responding. These are all good points. In response to NameCritic’s post, Googlers could be making more searches because they aren’t finding what they’re looking for on the first or second try whereas “newbies” may give up sooner if they don’t find what they’re seeking.

good catch on the ‘traffic’ vs. ’searches’. i missed that. i do use both google and yahoo and i see no particular difference in relevance.

two counterweights make it hard to argue for google’s fulfillment. if you look at google users, one of the top search queries are consistently the URLs! (e.g. amazon.com). in that case, fulfillment is sure to be 100%.

however, the volume of searches and the longer-tail of keywords makes it hard to keep the fulfillment levels up.

so i find it hard to argue that google could be superior in this statistic – definitely not to explain away the big difference.

[...] a great discussion going on regarding the supremacy of Google vs. the superiority of Yahoo on one of my previous posts. I encourage you to join the [...]

Wow, I hadn’t even thought about this when I pulled together this post. The reality is we really don’t have any preference here at Compete with regard to search engine. The only reason we partnered with Yahoo! on our search overlay was because they were the only ones that would have us. The volume of queries was too small for Google to even consider. The search overlay is really a very small piece of what we are doing here at Compete. More of an experiment than anything else. In the coming months you will see this shifting to more of a “backseat” on our site. I apologize for not acknowledging the apparent conflict of interest. Had I even thought of it I would have included it in the post. Truth be told I don’t have anything to do with the search overlay project.

Jeremy – Compete

Thanks for clearing that up, Jeremy. No hard feelings, I hope.

back to spandana and nick. first of all, enjoying the debate about google vs yahoo.

I don’t think, just my opinion, that searchers search more times at google because they do not find relevant results. I just think that a lot of google’s customers are researchers, seo people, web designers, aznd website owners who use google analytics, google adwords, and who track their results and those of their competitors a lot.

I believe that these types of people do twenty times more searches per day than the average Internet user.

Further I believe that the average user does not change their home page and search habits very often. If their computer came with an MSN or AOL homepage, a large percentage of them still have that a year later.

I think that yahoo gets to them and helps them change their home page to yahoo more than google does.

So I believe that yahoo, aol, and msn all have more “shoppers” who buy products.

I believe google has more people who do business on the web.

So for my business, since my customers are people who own websites, do seo, or design websites, I want to focus my efforts at listings in google.

If I sold bicycle parts, toys, makeup, clothing, etc. I would spend at least as much time on getting yahoo, msn, and aol traffic as I did google traffic. I think my conversion rates would be better with the other search engines than they would on google. I’m not sure the total traffic from the other search engines would be greater though.

Anyway, intersted in more on this exchange.