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posted by Jason Kottke  ·  gift link

Battle search engine

Intrigued by a stat that John Battelle pulled out of a Wired News story on search, that “the number of unique visitors to Yahoo Search trailed Google by a mere 10 percent”, I checked my search referers to kottke.org for December 2003 and found a somewhat different story:

Google 60%
Yahoo 22%
AOL 14%
MSN 3%
Earthlink 0.5%

Now, inferring the market share of a search engine from the referers is tricky because you can’t account for algorithm and display differences** (that is, Google may just love my site 3X more than Yahoo! does), so, you know, grain of salt and all that.

** Yahoo!, AOL, and Earthlink search are all currently powered by Google (making their effective search market share 97%), although they may determine and display the results in different ways.