I've just seen one interesting article : Google's true search market share is 70%. The guy have used Hitwise data to find out search market share. Jeremy Zavodny from Yahoo have commented that Hitwise data are correct for his website. Interesting.
I always thought Google had a bigger lead than actually portrayed. If this is true, Yahoo's value as a search engine is probably being overestimated.
For highly competitive keywords, and highly searched terms, its difficult to rank high on Google. Other Search Engines like Yahoo and MSN are better in this regard, and so send more traffic to the sites I work on, compared to Google.
Interesting poll. I'll be curious to see what the results are. I'd tend to agree with the basics though: at least 70% of searches happen through google, I'd say. The numbers for the Netherlands are even higher: 90% use google for most if not all their searches.
When I created the poll I haven't reliazed that it is not easily to calculate the percentage from Google. It took me few minutes to calculate that for my websites Google has 79.6% of search engine traffic.
Google takes the cake I feel. I have just checked my persentage & it was more than what I expected - it was like 68.33%. Quite amazing, good poll!
I get about 70% of my total search engine traffic from google 20% from Yahoo...the rest from other on one site I got less than half a percent from MSN....does anyone use msn these days?
One note: I just checked my stats and it really matters how one measures this. When comparing only search engines, Google tops at 90% for my site. When comparing ALL referres to my site, google comes in at 60%. When I also fit in the people who bookmark my site, google takes about 20% (because 60% of my visitors are repeat visitors - that took my by surprise, to be honest).
My sites are mostly newer. I get a lot of traffic from MSN, very little from Google. One of my sites that is about 6 months old gets 20-30% Google Traffic. My biggest site that is 5+ years old gets 60% from Google though.