Does search engine popularity dictate numbers or results?
Recently I noticed that some of my favourite sites don´t actually appear in some search engine results and on some occasions aren´t even indexed. So after doing some research into this I though about how search engine popularity affects the amount of results that are retrieved. Are the most popular search engines popular for good reason?
Accoring to Nielsen NetRatings Search Engine Ratings the most popular search engines in July 2006 were as follows. Note that Live is the new search engine from Microsoft that replaced their MSN search technology.
| Search Engine | Amount of market share |
|---|---|
| 49.2% | |
| Yahoo | 23.8% |
| Live | 9.6% |
| Others | 8.5% |
| Ask | 2.6% |
Lets look at the number of results for some search terms. I will use the previously popular search engine AltaVista to represent the others category. I will use three search terms I use daily, and according to Google Zeitgeist the most popular search term of last week was "anna nicole smith", so I will also include that for reference. I also would have included AOL in these results, but for some reason they don’t give an indication of the number of results returned.
| Engine | search engine optimisation | SEO | internet marketing | anna nicole smith |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 50,000,000 | 115,000,000 | 285,000,000 | 39,500,000 | |
| Yahoo | 6,960,000 | 219,000,000 | 219,000,000 | 32,500,000 |
| Live | 396,653 | 46,212,969 | 46,212,969 | 2,924,864 |
| Altavista | 6,970,000 | 220,000,000 | 220,000,000 | 45,000,000 |
| Ask | 674,700 | 33,930,000 | 33,930,000 | 821,900 |
Looking at the results it is quite clear to see why Google and Yahoo are the most used search engines. They give by far the greatest number of results for all search terms. The only discrepancy is AltaVista, which usually equals the Google and Yahoo results, and sometimes beats them both. I think this is just because AltaVista was previously the most used search engine.
The one thing that might cause an issue here is the subject of results relevancy. Just because a large number of results are returned, are they actually anything to do with the subject at being searched for? I think they do. To give an example, I searched Live for the term "search engine optimisation" and found a site that contained only the words "It Works!" on the first page of results. This is obviously ridiculous and only goes to prove my point!
Phil Norton
SEO Programmer
