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.
These statistics indicate to me that people using Google more easily find the information they were looking for then with Yahoo or MSN or AOL and AltaVista for that matter. That means these people are not having a particularly pleasant search experience and are less likely to be loyal to their search engine. The ironic thing is, that Google produce these results with much less apparent effort then either MSN or Yahoo, The Googlebot only visited us on 6 different days over the month of February, in that time we were visited by Yahoo, (Inktomi) 11 times and MSN a total of 41 times. The worst thing those two search engines ever did, was to grow their own search systems and stop using Google results (MSN used to use Yahoo’s results, and Yahoo got results from Google), because the end result is that many more people are leaving MSN and Yahoo not having found what they were looking for, or having had to search for longer (with more false positives) to find it, and that road currently has only one end: Google.com. That may change at some time in the future, but right now to me the statistics speak for themselves, Google users are finding our site in droves using search terms related to our content, Many MSN and Yahoo users are finding us as well, but more often then not, they are using search terms that have little or nothing to do with our content. Until the other engines fix their issues and improve their accuracy, in my humble opinion, they will never come close to taking Google’s crown. In the search industry, results count more then flashy graphics and tools. Results are the foundation upon which their whole platform rests and in my opinion, the only engine mentioned above with a solid foundation is Google. (I do not work for Google and, apart from the adsense ads we have place on our site, I have no affiliation with them either.)
