The US uses just four search engines mainly, and one of them almost two-thirds of the time. The same one dominates traffic driven to most ecommerce sites. Can you guess which?
Not to extend the suspense (not that there’s any suspense to begin with – it’s been the same for the two years I’ve been covering the industry), the top 49 other search engines make up just 1.66 percent of US searches. Together.
In May, says Hitwise, Google controlled 65.13% of US searches, which is actually a 0.13% drop from April. The difference didn’t go to the other four, though, who also dropped in volume, indicating that sliver of the pie was distributed among 49 others.
Yahoo clocks in with 20.89%; MSN brought in 8.4%; and Ask.com shows up with 3.92%.
The folks at Hitwise must have sensed that the numbers were getting repetitive as they added some figures about search engine traffic to various ecommerce sectors.
These are some really interesting numbers. Search engines drive 44.44% of the traffic Health and Medical sites receive. Almost 29.5% of their traffic comes from Google.
In the Shopping and Classifieds sector, Google provides 15.55% of traffic, making up the bulk of the almost 25% of traffic generated by search engines overall.
It’s generally the same all the way down:
News and Media – From Google: 13.18%; From all search engines: 20.34%
Entertainment – From Google: 12.94%; From all search engines: 20.8%
Business and Finance – From Google: 9.62%; From all search engines: 15.96%
