I spoke to a college who told me most of the searches on the planet are done on Google, my college showed me what information he used to come to this conclusion. First have a look at Google pr value its 9/10 and a Alexa raking of 17 not yahoo in the other hand had 8/10 which i can assume is to do with Google not giving a competitor higher than its self, but Alexa says yahoo is 1# site on he planet. Now if you go to Alexa put this it top bar http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=6m&size=medium&y=r&url=http://www.google.co.uk/#top you will see yahoo have fare more traffic than Google, but if you look at bottom of page were its says:- Where do people go on google.co.uk? (what's this) google.co.uk - 82% images.google.co.uk - 15% froogle.google.co.uk - 1% groups.google.co.uk - 1% news.google.co.uk - 1% You can see 82 us www.google.co.uk which is manly search orientated, were as if you go back to alexa page above and click on see traffic details for www.yahoo.co.uk just under graph to the rite underlained in blue and go to Where do people go on yahoo.com? (what's this) mail.yahoo.com - 51% search.yahoo.com - 8% news.yahoo.com - 4% login.yahoo.com - 3% yahoo.com - 2% bid.yahoo.com - 2% finance.yahoo.com - 2% sports.yahoo.com - 1% fantasysports.yahoo.com - 1% store.yahoo.com - 1% kids.yahoo.com - 1% groups.yahoo.com - 1% auctions.yahoo.com - 1% personals.yahoo.com - 1% my.yahoo.com - 1% messages.yahoo.com - 1% photos.yahoo.com - 1% profiles.yahoo.com - 1% stock.yahoo.com - 1% club.yahoo.com - 1% games.yahoo.com - 1% music.yahoo.com - 1% Other websites - 13% you will see they report that 51% of there traffic is by people useing there mail thus not seeraching for things to buy. Is this a fair evaluation or is there more to it? Can Alexa data be trusted? If not then i need someone to take a look at my site as i only get work from google, even though i have more pages indexed in the other engines. Daz Tarmey www.woodenfloorsales.co.uk/index.php this is my new page which im developing if anyone facys having a look at it. The old site is at www.wooodenflooringsales.com Also another site which is our search engines www.search4floors.com
As far as search engine traffic, I get a staggering majority from google. It could just be that yahoo has less of my pages indexed, but I think it's probably that the majority of people in the world just happen to use google to search.
I'd have to agree with froinlavan. I'm ranking at least top 5 for all my major keywords in MSN and Yahoo (not ranked in Google) and from what I gather from traffic coming in I haven't even begun to break into the market potential. Google is the market.
First of all Alexa measures TRAFFIC not the amount of searches each engine gets. If you want to see who gets more searches check out the Nielsen/Net rankings (do a search for the latest report) report on search engines. Last one i saw which was for October 2005, said Google had 48% of searches and Yahoo was at 22% i think. Second, Yahoo is also a portal. As you can see in the Alexa data, they have many things which Google does not. Just look at the homepages of Google and Yahoo and you will see the differences right away. So as far as their traffic goes, the majority of it goes towards other things than Yahoo search(ie mail, games, music, fantasysports, etc, etc, etc). So, if youre talking about traffic to Yahoo.com vs traffic to Google.com, then yes Yahoo is ahead. But as far as search volume, Google is dominating.
Very solid pionts and answers simon! Yahoo! has many facets beyond searching that brings them a ton of traffic, but that is in no way an indicator that people perform more searches there. Further, Alexa is an authority on Amazon only - in that, I mean their toolbar and stats are merely spyware for their parent company and they only get stats from those who have that toolbar ... not reliable for much IMO.
if you search the alexa site, you'll find the disclaimer where they acknowledge that their traffic rankings are based on "several million" user searches. several millions sounds like a lot, but in reality, it's only a tiny portion of the over 850 million users on the 'net... and in fact, the other day i saw a stat that claimed that there were now a billion internet users. alexa data is not reliable as any kind of an indicator of web traffic.