I bring this up because we've mentioned before how you shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket. Yet time and time again, this is what search marketers and webmasters do, they focus on one engine to the detriment of others.

Yesterday I did some research using Hitwise Competitive Intelligence and came across some interesting results.

For example, did you know that a search on Hitwise for Yahoo returns about 68 domains? That means that Hitwise tracks 68 unique Yahoo domains. These include of course Yahoo.com but also images, video and local as well as many portals from different countries.

Google too has about 65 unique domains. Again they include the main domains, as well as video, image and local search and many non-English sites.

MSN has about 25 while Ask has 8.

So what I did was gather all these domains into what Hitwise calls aggregations. That means that I put all the Yahoo domains into a group, all the Google domains into a group and so on, until I had 4 groups - Yahoo, Google, MSN and Ask. As these are the primary engines, I thought I'd start there.

Remember when I said that most webmasters and search marketers focus on Google? Well perhaps their strategy is somewhat flawed because in terms of reach, there is one group of sites which gets almost double the traffic that Google gets.

But before we get to that lets look at the top 20 search engines and directories according to Hitwise:

Rank 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

Website Google Yahoo! Search MSN Search Google Image Search Ask.com Yahoo! Image Search My Web Search Dogpile My Search Mapocity.com AOL Search AltaVista WhitePages.com Search.com Yahoo! Directory SuperPages.com - Yellow Pages About.com InfoSpace Yahoo! Yellow Pages Lycos Search

As you can see Google is indeed the #1 search engine. However this is Google.com only. You can see that Google image search is #4, however you will also notice that Yahoo sites occupy 5 of the top 20 spots.

So this got me thinking: What if I were to combine all network related sites, what would the numbers look like then? Well, according to Hitwise, they would look like this:

Rank 1. 2. 3. 4.

Website  Yahoo Google MSN Ask

Market Share 54.51% 32.21% 11.50% 1.79%

As mentioned above, I took those domains and aggregated them and then gave them their own category.

As you can see, of the 4 sites, Yahoo domains get the most traffic. In fact, Yahoo sites get almost twice as much traffic as Google sites, and almost six times as much as MSN sites. You can also see by this that Ask has a long way to go.

So by now you are probably saying "sure but email has to play a big part of that, after all Yahoo mail and Hotmail have been around for a lot longer than Gmail."

Except that these are market share numbers without email. This is just the various portals and search options the sites have available.

But since we're on the topic of email, let's take a look and see how they do stack up according to Hitwise:

Rank 1. 2. 3.

Website Yahoo! Mail MSN Hotmail Google Mail

Market Share 62.95% 34.62% 2.43%

This chart surprised me. I would have thought that Hotmail would have much more of the market than it does. But again, Yahoo! dominates.

Of course this is not a very scientific test, as I'm only using some Hitwise data that I've gathered in a short time, but it does show that while sometimes we tend to focus on Google, we should in fact consider the impact other engines can, and likely do have.

Consider this: If a site appears in the top 3 on Google, Yahoo! and MSN, potentially there are almost twice as many people who are exposed to your Yahoo! listing given the same search.

Also, consider the places a Yahoo! search box appears. I went looking yesterday at random and I see it in My Yahoo!, My Search, Yahoo! Email and even on Yahoo! 360, just to name a few. Virtually every Yahoo! page has a web search integrated into it.

Knowing that, and considering the numbers above, do you think you should expend most of your efforts optimizing for Google?

Rob Sullivan
Head Organic Search Strategist
Enquiro Full Service Search Engine Marketing

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