[lacker]

I used to work on search quality at Google, but I think I can answer this just using public information. ;-)

I think the answer is that Yahoo and Bing have a much higher rate of navigational queries - queries like [facebook] or [twitter.com] that are just the name of a site. This class of queries does indeed send a much higher proportion of their traffic to a small number of sites.

The available public statistics seem to confirm this. One example is here: http://blog.alessiosignorini.com/2010/02/average-query-lengt...

I'm sure they're not perfect, but let's assume these numbers are reasonable. Single-word queries are a decent proxy for navigational queries. 27% of Google's searches are one word, but 54% of Yahoo's searches are one word. So if you were measuring on any site that didn't get one-word traffic, you would see Google's searches overrepresented by 1.5X already.

This makes sense if you think about it. The sort of person that searches on non-Google search engines is very different than the sort of person that searches on Google. People who search on non-Google are much more likely to generally not understand the internet. They are likely to just use the search engine that was preinstalled when they got the computer. They are likely to not understand the difference between a URL bar and a search box. And they are likely to only use search for typing in the name of a site and directly going there.

[w1ntermute]

> I think the answer is that Yahoo and Bing have a much higher rate of navigational queries - queries like [facebook] or [twitter.com] that are just the name of a site. This class of queries does indeed send a much higher proportion of their traffic to a small number of sites.

> This makes sense if you think about it. The sort of person that searches on non-Google search engines is very different than the sort of person that searches on Google. People who search on non-Google are much more likely to generally not understand the internet. They are likely to just use the search engine that was preinstalled when they got the computer. They are likely to not understand the difference between a URL bar and a search box. And they are likely to only use search for typing in the name of a site and directly going there.

From observing non-tech savvy people using the internet, what I've found is that a lot of times, they know about Google and use it when they want to consciously make a search. But when they just want to access a site, they will type just the name of the site into the URL bar, which with modern browsers increasingly results in a search.

This method of searching uses the default search engine, which is often altered from Google even in browsers like Chrome due to these non-tech savvy people installing various software that changes the default search engine. But when these people want to do an "actual" search, they literally go to http://www.google.com/ and type in the search query there.

What's interesting is that a lot of times, they'll accidentally search with the default browser search instead, and they don't even realize that they're not using Google, which leads me to believe that they don't realize that there are different search engines, or that depending on whether they use their browser's default search or go to http://www.google.com/, they will get different search results.

I would be really interested to understand what goes through the minds of these people when they use the internet, because these sorts of things just scream out at me when I watch them browsing the web, but they seem to be completely oblivious to it. I just don't understand how they can miss the completely different site layout and URL.

[jordanlev]

What goes through their minds? Probably something like "I want to see what my friends are up to" or "I want to post a picture I just took" or "I'm bored and want to play Farmville". They just want to accomplish their task and browsers/URLs/search engines/keyboards etc. are just a means to that end.

I could imagine a similar analogy would be someone who is a professional racecar driver or just really into cars would be driving on a road thinking "I'm going to ease into this turn, and stay close to the inside" whereas most other people would be thinking "I have to remember to buy milk at the store after I pick up Jimmy from daycare".

[wisty]

What is going through your mind when you type "gm" and then hit autocomplete? It's a memorized task.

Do you wonder how DNS resolves? Do you wonder how the certificates are validated? Do you know what's in your .pem file? Who cares? It works, right?

Maybe you could make it more efficient, with some launcher program. But tasks that are memorized are easy to do (from a cognitive perspective), so you don't bother trying to improve them.

The human brain can be the laziest organ in the body. Well, it can be hard working, but in many cases it gets crazy blind spots, and gets stuck at a locally optimum point.

[w1ntermute]

> I could imagine a similar analogy would be someone who is a professional racecar driver or just really into cars would be driving on a road thinking "I'm going to ease into this turn, and stay close to the inside" whereas most other people would be thinking "I have to remember to buy milk at the store after I pick up Jimmy from daycare".

I think a more accurate analogy would be taking a different route to work and not even realizing it.

[jmilloy]

Then, for these users you describe, it could be that every google search is preceded by a bing search (from the browser search bar, for "google").

[jzawodn]

I used to work in Search at Yahoo! and can say that you are correct.

[roryleg]

This is an excellent point, but I think you mean that when taking non-1 words into account it would show that Google is about 1.5X underrepresented. If indeed that is the case, then the true "search/discovery" market share is about 90%, as supported through other commenters' site data.

Also compelling is the data AJ007 presents on number of days/month used. Bing at 8.9 trailing Google(21.5) and Yahoo (18) significantly. To me this clearly suggests that Bing users are the relatively unsavvy searcher of the Bing/Yahoo bunch. Does anyone have any recent demo data on the search engines? My guess is that Bing has a relatively older mix.

[AJ007]

I think the answer lies in several areas, yours probably explains 90% of it.

Other things:

-Comparison of average number of visits a month per unique user: Google-21.5, Yahoo-18, Bing-8.9

-From what I have seen with my companies own internal numbers, Yahoo & Bing users may be more inclined to click on search ads. Unless a webmaster is running a big ad campaign, they aren't going to see huge volume from these two search engines.

-What percentage of Yahoo's 140m monthly users are visiting the site to use Yahoo Mail verse to search?

I recommend using compete.com for traffic intelligence. It fairly accurately reflects my own site's data. I've been paying $500 a month for their lower premium tier for a good 2 years with no complaints for anything other than idiotic salespeople.

Another comment, as a webmaster comparing your percentage of traffic from one search engine verse the other is meaningless unless your rankings are exactly the same in all of them. A real test would have to be done with a PPC campaign strictly receiving traffic from google.com, bing.com, and yahoo.com

[dakotabatt]

I'm in sales and it just cracks me up when I see sales people who are selling a technical product do the stuff you pointed out. It is just a crackup and I try to show them there are better and faster ways to do things...Like opening multiple tabs vs. opening 4 or 8 browsers... And if you show them they forget. It is amazing.....