The Boxxet Blog

Google’s search share is > 90% ?

February 6th, 2007 You Mon Tsang

This is an installment of the ongoing “Metrics Series.”

A few weeks after we opened up Boxxet to search engines (about 7 weeks ago), I was worried. Traffic from Google started to come in at a good clip, but traffic from Yahoo, MSN and Ask was miniscule to non-existent. Given the latest search engine stats, I wanted non-Google traffic to give us roughly half of what Google was giving us. Here’s what Hitwise estimates as search engine share in Dec 2006.

We believe we went through the appropriate steps to let search engines know about us and told them through available APIs and submissions that we were ready to be crawled. But Google completely dominated the organic search traffic to Boxxet. We talked to friends at the search engine companies, scoured for tips and decided that maybe time will solve the problem.

But time has not brought change and at Boxxet, Google continues to bring in over 90% of all organic search engine traffic.

But recently, I have also noticed that other high-profile sites have similar organic search share. For instance, the top 11 referrals at Techcrunch in Dec 2006 look like:

1. google[organic] 391,034
2. (direct)[(none)] 326,796
3. digg.com[referral] 192,774
4. google.com[referral] 78,960
5. news.bbc.co.uk[referral] 46,621
6. netvibes.com[referral] 32,444
7. techmeme.com[referral] 25,561
8. stumbleupon.com[referral] 22,294
9. reddit.com[referral] 22,035
10. my.yahoo.com[referral] 19,643
11. techcrunch.com[referral] 18,869

On this list, there is no other organic search site besides Google, so I will make the following assumption:

12. yahoo [organic] 18,000
13. Others search engines: 18,000

So Techcrunch’s organic search share looks very similar to Boxxet’s.

Over at Search Engine Land, the folks there shared their top 25 referrals from Dec 2006 and Google is the only organic search site! So here again, I estimate Yahoo and the others as follows:

Google 6,172
Yahoo* 280
Others* 280

Search Engine Land also looks the same as Boxxet (as well as Techcrunch).

The organic search share at Boxxet, Techcrunch and Search Engine Land are virtually identical and heavily skewed towards Google. So the next step in solving this supposed anomaly is looking for commonalities.

• Boxxet and Search Engine Land are pretty new sites so perhaps the non-Google crawlers haven’t figured us out yet. On the other hand, Techcrunch has been around for almost two years.
• Techcrunch and Search Engine Land are tech sites, but Boxxet is focused mainly on entertainment and sports.
• Techcrunch and Search Engine Land use blogging software (looks like Wordpress and Movable Type). Boxxet has its own presentation engine.
• Only thing that we share is Google Analytics, but let’s pray that is impartial.

Bottom line, I am starting to draw a heart-stopping conclusion: Google’s search share is > 90%. I am open to any other thoughts or theories, but I am preparing for this new world. Rich Skrenta has a very thoughtful take on the era of Google dominance and that was assuming 70% dominance!

When a well-known and well-branded site like Techcrunch gets more people coming in through a Google search than by typing in “www.techcrunch.com,” I get a chill up my spine. Will future successes on the Web be determined by a bot originating from an office park in Mountain View?

Entry Filed under: Boxxet, Metrics Series