Why Googlers Google More Than (And Are Outnumbered By) Yahooligans

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Monday, 1 of October , 2007 at 8:02 am

There’s 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 conversation.

There seems to be some confusion as to which search engine gets the most traffic. Everyone likes to quote statistics that say Google gets the lion’s share of the search marketing. This is true. Depending on who you believe, the numbers range from 46% of the search marketing to over 60%. Yahoo hovers around the 20% range. But don’t confuse this with traffic. The two are not the same.

It is widely recognized in the SEO community that Googlers tend to make more searches per day. There is no doubt that people in the SEO industry and who do Internet marketing for a living perform more searches. Most of us use Google more than Yahoo. Regular folks who work a day job and browse the Internet at night don’t make as many searches.

Meet Roger, Yahooligan Extraordinaire

Think about it, Roger is a machinist at America Tool and Die. He works five 10 hour shifts each week, which leaves him little time for conducting searches. He gets up at five to drive one hour to work and clocks in at 6 a.m. At 4 p.m. he clocks out and drives two hours through rush hour to get back home. His good wife has dinner made when he walks in the door and he plays around a little after dinner with the kids. After they go to bed at 8 p.m. he logs onto his favorite search engine (Yahoo! because that was the home page when he bought his one-year-old Compaq). He is a huge fan of NASCAR so he makes a search for his favorite racer, Matt Kenseth. He reads all about Kenseth’s new car for about an hour then goes to his bookmarks and clicks on the NASCAR fantasy racing tab for Yahoo! then spends another hour managing his team before going to bed.

Maybe Roger makes more searches on weekends, but I’m guessing not. Especially in the summer when the beaches are full. Your SEO guru, on the other hand, the guy who “lives” on the Internet, how many searches do you think he makes every day? 10, 20, 30? Maybe more. And most of them are probably done through Google.

Now the numbers. Google gets roughly 60% of the search market. That’s a reference to the number of searches made every day. It has nothing to do with traffic. Yahoo! has about 20% of the market in searches, but people tend to go to Yahoo! for other things too, like local movie listings, chat rooms, shopping, games, etc. While Google may provide some of those other services, that’ s not what people go to Google for. Most people, when they buy a computer, get a computer with Yahoo! or MSN Live already configured to be their browser’s home page and they don’t change it. So they use it to do their searching. And if they have AOL then they use that. That’s why Yahoo! is the most trafficked website online, but Google is the search engine that is used for the most searches.

Category: Search Engines

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