A Hitwise report for August on US search engines shows who depends on their portals to feed their search boxes.
Getting to a search engine happens in different ways on different sites. The challenges faced by portals competing to keep their visitors within their network include a need to generate search traffic. Queries equal results, and those SERPs equal opportunities to display keyword-based ads.
The Hitwise report shows an interesting trend for what it calls the “clickstream,” which is the way users get to a search engine. The upstream path for Yahoo and MSN, the two biggest US portal sites, show just how much their search engines depend on traffic from other areas of the portals.
Yahoo’s search engine saw almost 73 percent of its traffic come from parent sites like www.yahoo.com and my.yahoo.com. MSN Search gets around 60 percent from traffic starting at www.msn.com and its related entry portals.
Going downstream from those two sites, as well as Google and Ask Jeeves (which will lose the butler soon according to numerous reports), sees users hitting sites in the shopping and classifieds category, according to the report. Got a news site? Chances are that Google or Yahoo, both of which have highly-ranked news portals, sent traffic to it.
As far as total searches go, Google appears to be growing in total share, at Yahoo’s expense. Both MSN Search and Ask Jeeves were relatively flat for the period measured in July 2004 compared to the same period for July 2005.
David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
