The mashups of our Top Alternative Search Engines list continue! Charles Knight spotted a great post by the Search The Web 2.0 blog, which took the top 100 and attempted to rank them by market share. The reason for this ambitious undertaking was a comment that Charles made when we first published the list:
"...people actually use four main search engines for 99.99% of their searches: Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com (in that order)."
Well it turns out the figure is closer to 95.45%, and that's counting AOL too! :-) Check out the actual blog post for the full table, with market share for each of the 100 alt search engines and more. But I especially liked these two summary graphs:
The above graph (large version here) shows the long tail of search engines, which is so small because Google, Yahoo et al are so dominant.
This graph (large version) shows the long tail "under a microscope (using a semi-log plot)". As SearchTheWeb2 explains, "it clearly shows that the long tail for the alternative search engines is again dominated by a few such as AOL, Digg and Del.icio.us".
Great stuff! Keep the mashups coming - you can find the other mashups, as well as Charles Knight's original Alt Search Engine posts, on his R/WW profile page.
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I claim "literary license" for my use of the 99.99% figure. It should be read as, "practically all" searches are done with these four search engines - rather than a bona fide statistic. Without a doubt, if you want accurate market share numbers, this excellent article has them.
Posted by: Charles Knight | March 13, 2007 4:49 AM
FYI,
We wrote a new article two days ago, titled "Global Search Market Share in 2007"
Posted by: Search the Web 2 | March 15, 2007 8:09 AM