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About Search Engines

The Internet and in particular search engines is a numbers game - the numbers are huge. If you don't like facts and figures turn away from the screen now. If you want a taste of the sheer numbers involved in Internet searching and website participation through the search engines, then keep reading.

By August 2008 in excess of 175 million sites were responsible for more than 21 billion individual pages, with the figures growing rapidly on a daily basis. There are approximately 1.5 billion Internet users worldwide, of whom 50% use search engines every day. Google, Yahoo and MSN currently account for over 90% of all these searches.

The major commercial search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN, drive the majority of web traffic. Google attracts approximately 60% of worldwide searches with 37 billion searches, Yahoo at 8.5 billion and Microsoft at 2.2 billion. A number of country-specific search engine companies have also become prominent in their own territories, for example Baidu in China, Guruji in India, Yandex in Russia.

In the UK there were 3.9 billion Internet searches during May 2008 with 31 million U.K. Internet users conducting at least one search. U.K. searchers conducted an average of 124 searches per searcher during the month, or 4.1 searches per day.

Google slightly increased its lead as the most popular search engine in the U.K. to 75.3% of all search queries, followed by eBay (5.5%), Yahoo! Sites (4.3%) and Microsoft Sites (3.4%). AOL LLC's acquisition of U.K. social networking property Bebo.com expanded its share of search queries to 2.3%, edging Facebook.com (2.2%) into sixth place.

In the USA Google's percentage of total U.S searches sat at 61.8% out of the total 10.8 billion searches. Google processed nearly 6.7 billion U.S searches. This is equal to approximately 214 million searches a day, an increase of 38 million search queries a day since July 2007. From July 2007 to May 2008, Google processed a total of 65.6 billion U.S searches, an average of 5.96 billion searches a month.

80% of Internet searchers find what they are looking for within the first three pages. Of these, nearly 70% would rather click on a natural listing. Over 50% of online shoppers primarily rely on a search engine when trying to find a product to purchase online.

Put simply, if you want a piece of the online action you simply HAVE to be at the top end of the search engine returns - sorry… make that Google returns.

Search Marketing or Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the process of marketing a website via search engines. It primarily consists of either or both Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising. Search marketing is big business, with sales and brand awareness the two major objectives behind all SEM programs. Spending on SEO in the USA alone is predicted to top the $11billion figure by 2011.

Final fact (for now anyway) - at the time of writing the term 'Sarah Palin' is the fasted growing search term on America's search engines, occupying 0.08% of total search entries.

Ok - for the numerically squeamish you may now look back at your screen.

The reason for assaulting you with these statistics is simple: to highlight the sheer scales and coverage of Internet search. It is a massive driving force behind the very existence and reason for the existence of the Internet in the first place. There's a vast amount of information out there and as data storage prices plummet and Internet usage rockets, the information grows exponentially. How do people access it? How can they access it reliably and easily? How can they know that the information they are offered relates to what they want? It is the search engines that attempt to answer these questions.

Before search engines, there was Tim Berners-Lee, compiling a list of all webservers. Fortunately for him search engines evolved from the pre web non-indexing Archie in 1990 developed in Montreal, through the Gopher system and on to the first Web search engine Wandex. One of the first "full text" crawler-based search engines was WebCrawler, which came out in 1994, the same year that Lycos was launched. It wasn't long before a whole new range of search engines appeared and vied for popularity - Magellan, Excite, Infoseek, Inktomi, Northern Light, and AltaVista. Yahoo! also offered a directory search facility.

In 1998 Google was launched, although it didn't achieve widespread success until 2000-2002 with the introduction of the Google Toolbar, the Adwords program and in 2003 Adsense. The company achieved better results for many searches with an innovation called PageRank, largely informed by its unique back linking technology that allows the engine to analyse the 'back links' pointing to a given website. (Google's original name was in fact BackRub after this fact).

Yahoo! acquired Inktomi in 2002, and AlltheWeb and AltaVista owner Overture in 2003. Combining the technologies of its acquisitions, Yahoo! switched from using Google's search engine to generating its own in 2004.

Similarly in 2004, Microsoft began a transition to its own search technology, powered by its own web crawler (called msnbot). Before this, it had been reliant on Looksmart, Inktomi and Alta Vista for search results.

The big four - Google, Yahoo, Microsoft MSN and ASK - are also fighting for content and marketshare outside of the core algorithmic search product, known as Vertical Markets. Rivalry is intense as they compete to become the default video platform. Google's recent acquisition of YouTube for $1.65 billion clearly signals their intent and at this stage puts them streets ahead of the others in this particular area.

By way of a parallel vertical strategy, Yahoo have extended their reach by buying high traffic properties like the photo-sharing site Flickr and the social bookmarking site del.icio.us.

Yahoo and Microsoft are aligned on book search in a group called the Open Content Alliance. Google again is going it alone, offering the proprietary Google Book search.

In other verticals like niche industry, entertainment and shopping search, other third party players can have a significant market share (Yellow Pages for example) or have gained traffic by accessing traffic streams from the major search engines. LookSmart has launched more than 180 vertical search sites.

It's an absolute fact of Internet life that to be successful on line you need high visibility. To enjoy a high profile your Internet presence must be optimised. By partnering a company like SEO Consult you access all the experience and expertise to enable your organisation to achieve top Internet search engine placements. We understand the search engines and SEO intimately, using that knowledge to gain significant competitive advantage for our customers.

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