According to ComScore, who likes to count these things, YouTube is now the number 2 search engine on the net, at least in the US. Yahoo! dropped 5% in total search traffic between July and August this year, moving it down to third place.
Frankly I'm astounded. I'm astounded that anyone is still using Yahoo! as their search engine. Incredibly, in August Yahoo! still managed to scoop almost 20% of the traffic.
That's 2.3 billion searches where someone has used Yahoo! over Google. Even if you are recondite enough to insist on Yahoo! As your home page, you still have Google on your toolbar, don't you? Don't you? Tell me you do.
This isn't the mid-nineties when being net savvy meant having a toolkit of half a dozen or so different search engines, each useful in certain circumstances. Google is the only search engine that makes any sense at all for anything.
The war is over; Google has won and in fact, I have already said that I would like to see Google replace the DNS protocol as well.
Having thought about it hard, I can come up with just one reason why Yahoo! receives any search requests at all: accident. Clearly every person searching with Yahoo! already has the page open, to read the celebrity gossip or check mail or something and they accidentally type their search into the Yahoo! box instead of into the Google one on the toolbar above.
One way to measure this would be to look for pairs of searches very close together from the same IP address. First, a search on Yahoo! for "interracial kitten hot fudge" (just an example, jeez!) and then moments later that same search string in Google as Joe Six-pack thinks "Wait a minute! This isn't Google… D'oh!"
Interestingly, if you do try that particular search string, Google will turn up some distinctly NSFW results. Whereas Yahoo! comes up completely empty. Which I suppose could be another reason to favour the number 3 player.
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northerngeek
October 16th 2008
1. I used Yahoo for a long time, more recently than I have used Google. Personally it's Live.com for me, their video and image search engines are far superior to Google's in my mind and the web search gives me better results.
I generally disagree with remarking on the quality of a journalists work but this Google praising is drivel. Google are not that great a company, their competition tries harder and does better in many areas and as for the days of multiple engines being long gone- try specialising in a subject such as medicine and comparing Searchmedica, Medstory etc to Google... there's no contest.
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