When I posted Enquisite’s search engine popularity stats yesterday, I almost went into a riff about how site owner traffic stats are often so different from what the major measuring services report. Google almost always comes out much, much higher when you look at site traffic referral sources (as with Enquisite’s stats). I did get into this on yesterday’s Daily SearchCast. But Rich Skrenta does a great job on the issue for who prefer to read about the issue. More on his post, along with a long look at stats, the pros and cons of Google being a huge traffic driver, and more.

Google’s true search market share is 70% is Rich’s article. He highlights how the ratings services tend to put Google in the 40 percent range, but site owner traffic shows Google with a much higher than that. Having access to Hitwise’s stats, he fires up a chart showing the traffic various sites get from different search engines — Apple, Craigslist, eBay and others. The percentage of Google traffic far outweighs that from other sites.

To be super clear, let’s zoom in on one site, Apple. Hitwise reported that 8.6 percent of its search related traffic came from Google, with Yahoo behind at 2.4 percent.

Now if you work off the general benchmark that Google is reported to have 40 percent of the search share, versus Yahoo generally around 20 percent, you can see the gap. The percent of traffic Yahoo sends should be about half the 8.6 percent Google sends — or 4.3 percent. It’s not. It’s that lower 2.4 percent figure.

Of course, "general benchmark" is not entirely accurate. To explain more, I have to go back to that Search Popularity Stats, Sliced & Diced article I did last month. Here were the figures for all search engines, for traffic in the US, for October 2006:

And here’s a zoom in on just Google from October 2005 through October 2006:

On average (comScore, NetRatings & Hitwise for October 2006), Google has a 52 percent share. That’s higher than the "40-something percent market share" that Rich talks about. For ages, 40-something would have been fine to say, but 50-something is more accurate. But he’s still dead on target that if you talk to site owners, Google drives a far higher percentage than the share of searches happening. It’s more like 70 to 90-something for them.

Remember my Search Engine Land Stats: December 2006 Preview that I did last week? That illustrates the case so well. We had 800 search related visits from Google for the first week or so in December, compared to 37 (37!) from Yahoo, the next highest search engine.

Oh, but Search Engine Land is such a new site. Sure, but that shouldn’t have so much to do with it. Yahoo’s supposed to be a good search engine. It should be able to find all of our pages just like Google. And, I can see we have plenty listed. Those pages so far just haven’t sent us much traffic.

Well, maybe we haven’t optimized right for Yahoo. Well, we haven’t optimized for Google. We’ve optimized generally, doing the things any search engine wants. But Google delivers more.

Just a fluke for Search Engine Land? No — at Search Engine Watch, Google was also the biggest driver. How about my personal blog, Daggle? For Dec 1 through 19, I had 18,098 "organic" or search-related visits. Google sent 16,839 of those — 93 percent. MSN was next highest at 383 or 2.1 percent, followed by Yahoo with 349 or 1.9 percent.

Ask any site owner, and almost consistently, they tell you Google is by far the biggest search engine source they have. That makes life pretty sucky for Google.

Consider the routine freak-outs that happen if Google makes an algorithm change and someone loses traffic. They get blamed for hating webmasters; for trying to drive up AdWords purchases; for trying to promote their own content; for dissing the little guy. You name it. Heck, you’ve even got some people like Barry Schwartz who think they shouldn’t do algorithm changes during the holidays to especially protect site owners from any harm.

If Yahoo or Microsoft has a hiccup, most site owners don’t care. They don’t care because they don’t notice. They don’t notice because they aren’t getting much traffic relatively speaking. And if they aren’t getting much traffic, then where are all those searchers going if comScore or NetRatings or Hitwise say the search stats are higher.

They might not be going to web search. Lots of stuff is mixed in with search data. In the New Year, I’ll try to do an entire new drill down into the stats. But a search for something on Yahoo Sports? That might be counted as a "search," and it is — but it’s not the type of search that would register with site-based metrics. The searcher might stay entirely inside Yahoo.

Back to Google, I feel for them (as I talked about more on yesterday’s Daily SearchCast). The clearly send so much traffic — and traffic for free — to websites and get so much grief in return because of it. If they were less dominant, the Blame Google mentality (and don’t bother checking anyone else) would diminish. But then so would the traffic site owners love from Google.

That’s one reason why I love what Google’s been doing with Google Webmaster Central. I talked about this in my keynote at SES Chicago this month, plus it was on my 25 Things I Love About Google list earlier this year. Big bad evil Google, as it is often painted, has consistently been adding more tools and offering more advice to support site owners who want the free traffic from Google. Yes, there’s a good PR aspect to doing this. But there’s also a sense of relief for me that Google — so fixated on chasing the video dollar, the radio buck, the newspaper cash, throwing ads up wherever we are — actually is putting in significant time and resources to help site owners.

I’ll leave off with some reading materials on stats, if you want to get into them more, from my past writings over at Search Engine Watch:

• comScore Figures Show First Google Decline For Nearly A Year, But What To Believe?: First in a series I did earlier this year, it looks at many of the issues in knowing what goes into some of the figures we get from ratings services.
   
• NetRatings: Tiny Google Decline, But Not The First Time & Yahoo Growth: Second in my series, the focus shifted to stats from NetRatings.
   
• Hitwise: Google & Yahoo Make Tiny Gains In July 2006: Third in the series, the focus was on Hitwise.
   
• Search Popularity Stats, Sliced & Diced: Fourth in the series, it took stats from all the services over time and charted them out, plus offered tips on understanding why they don’t all agree.
   
• Alexa Ain’t So Bad, Says Site Search Comparison: Alexa figures depend on data sent back by the Alexa toolbar, and many feel these can easily be gamed. Links to background on that, plus some support for Alexa.
   
• Why Don’t External Site Popularity Estimates Add Up?: Covers both a good BusinessWeek article (Web Numbers: What’s Real?) on why your own internal metrics might not match ratings services plus Website Analytics vs. Competitive Intelligence Metrics from SEOmoz, which shows among other things, a number of sites listing Google as a top referring source.
   
• WebSideStory: Google Continues Its Popularity Rise: Unlike comScore, NetRatings and Hitwise, which take in data based from monitoring users, doing surveys or using ISP traffic information, WebSideStory data comes from traffic hitting actual web sites. This shows you the Google climb over time. Back when the others were putting Google in the high 40 percent share range, WebSideStory was in the mid-50 percent. Unfortunately, the company doesn’t consistently issue stats on a regular basis (press release page is here).
   
• OneStat Says Google Stays On Top In Global Search: OneStat is similar to WebSideStory, depending on site owner traffic data to do ratings. The downside to traffic data is that there are other types of skews they can have, such as the Yahoo Sports example above. That is a search — and it is a share of searches that should be measured. It just might not translate into site owner traffic.

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Google: Critics | Stats: Popularity

About The Author: Danny Sullivan is a Founding Editor of Search Engine Land. He’s a widely cited authority on search engines and search marketing issues who has covered the space since 1996. Danny also serves as Chief Content Officer for Third Door Media, which publishes Search Engine Land and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series. He has a personal blog called Daggle (and keeps his disclosures page there). He can be found on Facebook, Google + and microblogs on Twitter as @dannysullivan. See more articles by Danny Sullivan

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