Hello,

Forgive the sort-of-repeat posting - I first put this in the Other Search Engines forum, but haven't had any response - which perhaps illustrates what I'm talking about re. the importance of Google vs. the other search engines?

What it is is that I'm getting about ten times as many visits from Google as from its nearest competitor (Yahoo) - on both my personal site and the one I maintain for my day job - but these statistics show little more than a factor of two between them. What gives?

My main question is - what proportion of your visitors come from Google, compared with the other search engines? What proportion would you expect, based on your impressions of the browsing habits of friends and acquaintances? Does anyone have any idea what the geographical distribution of search engine usage is like?

Cheers!

- Oolong.

For me, most of my sites I don't get traffic from Google, but rather MSN and Yahoo are my major traffic senders.

I think this is because I have made my early sites really keyword heavy, and Google doesn't think they are "real" sites. Where Yahoo and Msn perhaps are not as advanced at ignoring certain types of sites.

I get 80 % of the traffic compared to Yahoo and compared to rest of the world I get 60% from the Google.

I have a growing suspicion that ratings like the Nielson ones above are more based on access to users than actual numbers of searches performed. ie, MSN could have a good proportion of Googles user-base, but far fewer of them are searching.

Looking at the traffic generated from #1 positions on the "big 3" search engines to sites I am lucky enough to have in those spots Google delivers way more in the way of traffic - definitely not proportional to the supposed traffic figures of the engines.

If they are all counting actual searches then the only other conclusion is that Yahoo & MSN have an awful lot of people searching for stuff and then not bothering to click on the results they find.