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Another example of GOOGLE predominance

By Sheldon Goldberg

Real Estate Agent with Dream Realty

November 20, 2007 12:13 AM

One of my websites, www.ClearwaterDreaming.com happens to be in a very unique position to monitor the dominace of the top 3 search engines. The primary keyword phrase the site is optimized for is: Clearwater real estate.

The site has been #2 on GOOGLE, MSN and YAHOO for some time. When you go to the site you will see one of the major conversions is to have the user search for property. The property search engine is at the top and the most noticeable action item on the site.

I monitor all searches made: what exactly was searched for, when and from where. What did they search in the search engine to get to my site, etc.

Amazingly, out of every 13 referrals from the top 3 search engines, a whopping 10 are from GOOGLE, 2 from YAHOO and only 1 from MSN. This is not consistent with the "normal" statistics you read about, GOOGLE around 50%, YAHOO around 25% and MSN around 12. But, the stats at Clearwater Dreaming of 10,2 and 1 repeat themselves day after day.

I do some adwords advertising for a disrelated company that I own part of, www.BCG-LLC.com and the results are similar for pay per click - though not as skewed in GOOGLE's favor. More like 7-2-1 for the same ad, paying about the same for pay per click with each search engine.

Does anyone else out there have similar/dissimilar stats? To me, it looks like GOOGLE has much more than 50%.

Happy Thanksgiving to all,

Shel

Provider

Searches (000)

Share of Total Searches (%)

Google

3,994,158

54.0

Yahoo

1,443,244

19.5

MSN/Windows Live

890,685

12.0

AOL

444,493

6.0

Ask.com

158,969

2.2

My Web Search

61,911

0.8

Comcast

38,926

0.5

BellSouth

35,740

0.5

SBC Yellow Pages

29,424

0.4

My Way

26,750

0.4

Other

268,779

3.6

All search

7,393,079

100.0

Comments(10)

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Charlie Ragonesi

AllMountainRealty.com - Big Canoe, GA

Homes - Big Canoe, Jasper, North Georgia Pros

lET ME AD A WRINKLE. yES i TRACK AND SEE THE SAME RESULTS MORE OR LESS bUT i FIND THE yAHOO BUYERS AND msn BUYERS ARE THE ONES THAT ACTUALLY DO SOMETHING UNLIKE THE GOOGLE ONES

Nov 20, 2007 12:22 AM

Ginger Magoon

Remax - Bryan College Station - College Station, TX

Bryan, College Station Texas Real Estate

I want to learn more about the pay per click. I dont quiet understand it but I hear it works

Nov 20, 2007 12:24 AM

John Stauffer

John Stauffer MBA, E-pro,CRS, ABR, GRI, SRES - Battle Creek, MI

Doers this mean that the Prudential folks (Yahoo) put their eggs in the wrong basket?

Nov 20, 2007 12:29 AM

Sheldon Goldberg

Dream Realty - Clearwater, FL

Regarding Charlie - I have head the same thing for some others. There may be some truth to that.

Nov 20, 2007 12:35 AM

Regarding Ginger,

Adwords is GOOGLE's pay per click. They are the sponsored links you see at the very top and on the right side of search results. As an advertiser, you bid for an approximate position for your ad. To be at the top for popular search queries normally costs $4.00 or more every time a user clicks on one of your ads.

When they click on your ad, you want them to "land" on a web page that encourages them to take some action, whether to call you, fill out a form, etc. This way you can monitor the effectiveness of your advertising.

You can of course, set your ad bids to be lower and your ad will be shown less and will be shown lower on the page. Really depends on your budget.

That is it in a nutshell. This link from GOOGLE explains the whole process.

Best, Shel

Nov 20, 2007 12:44 AM

Fred Light

| Nashua Video Tours - Nashua, NH

Real Estate Video Tours for MA and NH

Everything I've read in the past months shows Google with over 65% of all searches. Yahoo comes in a distance second, and MSN is barely a blip on the radar screen anymore (although they are beta testing their 'new' search right now, so you can't count them out yet- although I would love to!).

A recent study I saw at a seminar last month showed YouTube as the #3 search engine...above MSN! Go figure!

Nov 20, 2007 12:51 AM

Re Fred- I am curious where you got the info on Youtube. That is pretty interesting. Maybe the following chart would never include youtube since it is not an "official" search engine.

My data source was www.searchenginewatch.com

Provider	Searches (000)	Share of Total Searches (%)
Google	3,994,158	54.0
Yahoo	1,443,244	19.5
MSN/Windows Live	890,685	12.0
AOL	444,493	6.0
Ask.com	158,969	2.2
My Web Search	61,911	0.8
Comcast	38,926	0.5
BellSouth	35,740	0.5
SBC Yellow Pages	29,424	0.4
My Way	26,750	0.4
Other	268,779	3.6
All search	7,393,079	100.0

Nov 20, 2007 02:08 AM

Elizabeth Weintraub Sacramento Broker

Elizabeth Anne Weintraub, Broker - Sacramento, CA

Put 40 years of experience to work for you

The bulk of my page views come from Google. I don't seem to rank well in Yahoo, and I don't know why. My Yahoo hits are about 10% of my Google hits. But overall, the chart that Sheldon supplied looks quite accurate to me. There are a lot of other sites that register apart from Google, which lowers the gross percentage of Google page views. But Google is still the leader for me. Second to Google is my own site because of crosslinking and a Google-powered search function.

Nov 20, 2007 02:18 AM

Actually, I went to an SEO seminar last month on Universal Search and the person who presented showed us that information, taken from some recent survey. YouTube is NOT considered a search engine, per se... I think the illustration was basically showing that YouTube gets more viewers than MSN search.

Nov 20, 2007 06:43 AM

Thanks, Fred. What you say makes sense. I think YOUTUBE and video search is going to continue to increase market share. There is obviously a very big opportunity there.

Nov 21, 2007 12:46 AM

Another example of GOOGLE predominance

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Sheldon Goldberg

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