Recently both Websidestory and Onestat released their findings that although Firefox usage was still growing, it’s uptake was slowing down a little. I don’t believe that is the full story and I’m about to tell you why. The first thing to keep in mind, is that Onestat collect their statistics from users of their various online counter offerings. Websidestory apparently get their statistics from several big sites like Disney, Sony, Best Buy and Liz Claiborne.

The problem is is that both of these methods miss a crucial (vast) and growing Internet population, namely the power users. In the case of Onestat with their online counter systems, the problem is that generally only two types of clients use this type of service, newbies and occasionally businesses. In the case of Websidestory, the big sites they monitor are not those likely to be those visited by power Internet users, if you are one yourself, do you remember the last time you visited Disney or Liz Clairborne?

That skips a vast portion of the Internet’s users, namely the techies and power users. These guys know what they want online, they know where to go, and a vastly higher number of them use the Firefox web browser. The Internet’s users are slowly becoming more knowledgeable then they once were, and this group of power users are growing all the time. Experienced Web developers are likely to be using their own log file analysers for statistics and for those without log file access, counters like our own statistical counter that serve the same purpose. The only places I really see remote hit counters is on newbie web pages and free blog services (the exact places where one expects people to be using the default browser that came with their computer.)

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Google currently has the search engine crown firmly fixed to it’s collective heads. Nobody would argue with that status at this stage, but many aspire to take that crown. I’ve found myself wondering why Google has the crown, when they are not much more then half the age of Yahoo, and have a tiny portion of the funds available to MSN (Microsoft). Why do people keep turning to Google?

For web search, I think I can answer this question. The answer is “results” folks. You seem to get what you want faster and with less wading through fales positives then you do with either MSN or Yahoo. I hear you ask: What do I base this declaration on? I’m basing my judgement on the statistics from this very site. Ninety percent of the search traffic leading people to this site is from Google, but that isn’t the statistic behind my reasoning. My statistical counter collects the terms used by people who found this site from several of the big search engines, and it collects the terms they used to find the site, and the number of times that search term was used.

When I look at the search terms people used in Google to find us, I see loads of searches for HTML, XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, MySQL related terms, and terms related to stories we’ve covered. In fact out of the 500 odd Google search terms collected from the first of March thus far, there are almost no gibberish terms that should never have lead people to us. Then I look at the Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista and AOL terms collected and I see hardly any terms that directly relate to our site, the people searching for this stuff would not have found what they were looking for here. And therein lies the key.

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