Was just cruising some of the metrics on our Mint installation, and clicked on the Search Engines tab in the Referrer Aggregator Pepper (read: plugin), and saw these results:
- Google 14,805
- Yahoo 402
- MSN 294
- Google Blog Search 94
- Ask Jeeves 53
- Dogpile 38
- AOL Search 24
- Answers.com 13
- A9 12
- Altavista 10
I know I’ve said all along that blogs are at least as much about search engine traffic – and by proxy, internet visibility – as they are about feed subscriptions. But can Google really be that dominant? Since we turned that Pepper on, Google’s leading everyone else by an order of magnitude? Everything I read leads me to believe that Google’s share is more in the 30% plus range; market leading, but not absurdly so. Nor can I really explain this via context. Our percentage of users running Firefox, as an example, are much higher than the general populations – just south of 60%, rolling all the Mozilla versions up – because of our audience. But our search traffic is far less specific – someone stumbled on my blog the other day, for instance, searching for Kate Hudson’s cellphone number. I’m at a loss to explain this.
In other news, I dropped CrazyEgg’s JavaScript codes on my blog and redmonk.com the other day, and the results are somewhat interesting. More on that when I get time.
Update: Tim Bray notes a similar Google dominance here.
