Back in the middle school when I first learned about the Internet, I remember the teacher telling us about search engines. We were assigned to look something up using a search engine. I don’t remember what the information was or which search engine it happened to be. But I do remember quickly finding Dogpile to be my favorite search engine. I don’t know if it was because of the name, or I actually thought I was getting the best results by using a search that searched many different search engines, but that was my choice.
At some point later, I made the switch to Google. As I have mentioned on here time and time again, I love Google applications.
Today, while looking through the Google Analytics of my site (/), I decided it would be fun to look at the stats from the beginning of my site, through yesterday. This date range is March 10, 2007 to May 1, 2009, just over 2 years of information. My site is not a high volume site by any means. In the past two years I have had 5,308 visits (3,283 which are unique), 10,780 page views and an average time on site of 2 minutes and 1 second. As there is a slight trend of increasing visitors, I can say I am happy with the results of my site (which is mainly my blog).
Out of all the traffic that comes to my site, 42.29% are from search engines. This statistic really makes me happy. That means that the information I am providing in my blog and other pages is relevant to what people actually want to read about. But what really gets me is this next part. Out of the visits from search engines, 95.91% of those visitors have found my site through Google. Coming up in a no-where-near second place is Yahoo with 2.18% followed by Ask, AOL, and Live with 0.58%, 0.49% and 0.31% respectively.
So this brings me to the question of the post… do people really use other search engines? I know my roommate swears by Yahoo. He loves the front page Yahoo provides with news, videos, and pictures. But really, there is a 93.73% difference in Google vs. Yahoo.
Do you have a website that you run analytics on? What do you see from your search engine traffic? Maybe Google Analytics is just biased…