I think IE, FF, Safari, Opera, NetScape and all the other browsers should have some plugin enabled which send statistics back to a website like Alexa, so we can see who the REAL winners are. Alexa is a daft tool on the Internet to get really, really rough traffic results, nothing more. Remember people, everytime someone installs some Windows Live software, it asks you if you want to change your homepage and IE7 search bar to Live Search. A lot of people don't even take notice and click 'next' until it is installed, meaning a lot of Live.com's data will be fixed by these results. This doesn't indicate who is actually USING the Live.com search engine.
Because live.com is the default homepage for millions of Vista and XP users who don't bother to change their home, it also gets hits from other M$ products like messenger and gadgets. What would be interesting is the bounce rate from live.com to google or yahoo.com to google
Out of all those, Google is still going to be the most successful and the biggest. While those three above Google are pretty big, Google is much more broad and has a lot more coverage. They even own Youtube, which currently ranks before them. As for me, I'm around 69,000. Be ready for me to outrank Google soon though.
I get some very strange stats from Live... it's almost as tho they're fake, like they're sending out robots to make it look like we get lots of traffic from them... I wouldn't be surprised at Microsoft for trying this tactic..
Seems True! I've been getting some traffic from live.com and it shows some absurd keywords which are not at all related to my site!