Don't say 'search engine' - say 'Google'.

Knowledge is power: search engine statistics

Any search engine marketing strategy requires a a clear indication of search engine usage. There are thousands of search engines and directories worldwide, but only a handful of those produce the vast majority of all search engine traffic.

The search engine war is won

There are a wide range of statistics available to measure search engine performance: audience reach, time spent on site, size of index, accuracy of results, etc. 1 Cog monitors a broad range of statistics and one search engine clearly dominates the market: Google.

The most accurate indicator of search engine usage is 'search hours'. The following figures show the top 3 search engines:

• Google -> 13 million hours
• Yahoo -> 5.4 million hours
• MSN -> 4.9 million hours

Source: Neilsen / Netratings, March 2002.

Google not only produces the majority of search engine traffic in its own right, it also supplies results to Yahoo, AOL, the BBC, iWon and Netscape. So the statistics above show that Google effectively produces over 4 times the traffic that MSN does.

More evidence

Searches Per Day, January 2003, United States. Note that Google supplies results to AOL, Yahoo, Netscape and Earthlink, making it the most used search engine by a massive margin.

Google or bust

If your site is not listed in the first page or two of Google results you can expect to receive little search engine traffic. Fortunately we excel at gaining excellent search engine position in Google.

Although we concentrate on search engine ranking in Google, we do not neglect the other major search engines.