Recently, someone from a Google competitor told me that they were catching up, within a few percentage points. I didn’t believe that at all, but I decided that intuition is boring and hard data is interesting. So I went and ran search engine rankings for ongoing weekly through 2005. The numbers are surprising, to say the least. [Update: Thought-provoking feedback, and some conclusions] [And more feedback from Search Engine Watch.].

2005 Search Engine Rankings at onoging

The surprise, of course, is that Google image search sends me more traffic than ordinary Google search. For the whole year, the average weekly referral numbers are: Ask Jeeves 14, Google 3967, Google images 5468, MSN 139, and Yahoo 644.

I may decide to make this a weekly feature if there’s sufficient interest out there.

Feedback: Watch that Extrapolation · In private email, Tim Converse made a subtle but telling point. I observe that I’m getting 38% or so more traffic from Google Image search than regular Web search; would it be reasonable to conclude that Image search is 38% more popular across the length & breadth of the Web? I doubt it; the numbers probably have something to do with the fact that I publish way more pictures than your average blog, and put quite a bit of work into them, and make sure they’ve all got nicely-searchable metadata.

Well, if you believe that, you should also be careful about concluding that Google has 6 times the traffic (or 14 times, if you count the image searches) that Yahoo gets; quite possibly it’s something about ongoing causing at least part of the gap.

Tim also pointed to this report at Search Engine Watch; but scroll down to the second pie chart under the heading “Search Providers”, which is apparently measuring the same thing I’m trying to; it shows a much more evenly-divided playing field than do my numbers.

Mind you, that study (as, to be fair, Tim points out) has transparency issues; the description of how ComScore develops those numbers sounds kind of plausible, but you’d want to place a lot of trust in their user-selection, traffic-monitoring, and programming techniques to believe the numbers in their chart. I can see why this report’s making Yahoo happy, but I’m unconvinced, because I don’t think ongoing is that far off the mainstream. But hey, I’m just a guy with a geek/flower-pix website and a Perl script. On the other hand, if ComScore has posted an actual description of where their numbers come from, let me know and I’ll highlight them.

Danny Says... · That would Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch, approximately the center of the world for those who care about this stuff. Anyhow, Danny wrote to point a two more interesting market-share pieces: one from NetRatings, and an real interesting analysis by Andrew Goodman.

Conclusions · Taking all the difficulty and doubt into account, two conclusions still jump out at you, one of which is surprising:

  1. Google is still in the lead.

  2. You can drive a ton of traffic to your site with some pretty pictures and a bit of care & attention to metadata.

Methodology · Here is the script that I ran over the Apache weekly access_log files. I’d love to hear if someone spots an error in the code, and will report and update if so.

#/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
my $f = '\S+\s+';
my %engines;

my $lastGImage;
while (<STDIN>)
{
  my $who;
  my $agent;
  if (/^(\S+)\s+$f$f$f$f$f$f$f$f$f\"(\S+)\"/)
  {
      $who = $1;
      $agent = $2;
  }
  
  my $e = '';
  next if ($agent =~ /^-?$/);
  if    ($agent =~ /search\.yahoo/)               { $e = 'Yahoo'; }
  elsif ($agent =~ m@^http://images.google@)
  {
      if ($who ne $lastGImage) { $e = 'Google Images'; }
      $lastGImage = $who;
  }
  elsif ($agent =~ m@^http://www.google.*search@) { $e = 'Google'; }
  elsif ($agent =~ m@^http://search.msn.com@)     { $e = 'MSN'; }
  elsif ($agent =~ m@^http://web.ask.com@)        { $e = 'Ask Jeeves'; }
  if ($e) { $engines{$e}++; }
}

my $e;
$ARGV[0] =~ s/.log.*$//;
print "$ARGV[0]\t";
foreach $e (sort keys(%engines))
{
  print "$engines{$e}\t";
}
print "\n";

Note the trick with Google Image search; the result pages are set up in such a way that in almost every case, you see two or three accesses in a row from the same image search; so I count a bunch of successive accesses from the same host just once.


author · Dad
colophon · rights

May 29, 2005
· Technology (90 fragments)
· · Search (66 more)
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