Some site owners also conducted their own studies to compare the three and almost all came out with Google as the most used search engine. Google % is almost twice that of Yahoo. What makes some question the percentages of shares in the informal studies is the fact that there is no uniform procedure of gathering the data. One example is that in some in some studies, only searches at Google's home page were included while the homepage of yahoo! was not. In some, traffic at Google homepage is counted while in Yahoo, traffic in its homepage is not counted.
Nielsen Netratings also show Google way on top of Yahoo and MSN. In Nielsen Netratings, the sites included in the study were clearly stated. Below is a tabulation of the share of searches of the top three by Nielsen netratings.
Although Yahoo! registered the highest growth ( 30.1%) its share of the total searches made by internet users was still below 50% of that of Google search.
From the other sources of data, it's also Google which is the favorite search engine for internet users. For internet marketers this information is very important because its rank in Google is equated to its site traffic by online advertisers. Since statistics show that there are far more searchers using Google, it is important that their site ranks high, at least on page one. The importance of being on page one is that it is the habit of researchers to click only on the page one entries. Maybe most researchers are so busy they have no time to go to the next page.
However, it's not just visitor's traffic that matters. What is most important to site owners is quality traffic, which is what we'll be talking about next.
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