Google is tops

Jeremy Zawodny blogged I was looking at some updated stats for my web site and decided to plug the numbers into Excel so that I could more easily visualize the relationships. The chart below is one of several I produced. It shows the percentage of search referrals I can attribute to each of the major search engines for the month of October 2005.

His chart shows 80% of his hits came from Google

What's interesting to note is that neither AOL or MSN are "major search players" if you look at these numbers and nothing else. All other search engines combined provided more referrals than either AOL or MSN. The gap between Google and Yahoo! is hard to interpret, since it doesn't come close to matching the publicly available market share numbers. The same is true of the numbers for MSN and AOL. They should be higher. There are two ways I can think to explain this:

1. People who use Google are more likely to be searching for content that's on my site.
2. The market share numbers are wrong. Google actually generates more traffic than has been reported and MSN and AOL have been over-estimated.

I suspect that #1 is closer to reality. After all, I most often write about topics that are of interest to an audience that's more technical than average. And I suspect that crowd skews toward Google in a more dramatic fashion than the general population of Internet users. If that's true, it would seem to confirm many of the stereotypes about AOL and MSN users.

Inside Google blogged Inspired by Jeremy, here are my search engine referral statistics, with Google dominating heavily. Included are every non-human edited website in the top 250 referrals. Ask is nonexistent, AOL is being beaten by Del.icio.us, MSN is being beaten by a ping server, and Bloglines is beating all Yahoo referrals. Google has five products on the list, all of which beat every other engine, save Yahoo. Google products take 79.44% of the list. UPDATE: JR Conlin points out that while Google wins hands down on search referrals, Yahoo kills Google on total referrals, thanks to it having more than two highly-used services.

Maybe that is why Mercury News reported The 800-pound Google - Is there no slowing for Google? After a standout earnings report Thursday that surpassed the expectations of practically every outsider, Google's stock price set a new record Friday as a bevy of analysts rushed to raise their stock price predictions, most to $400 a share or higher within the next year. Google's stock vaulted 12.1 percent, or $36.70 a share, to $339.90, four times the $85 price of its initial public offering just over a year ago. At one point during the day, Google's shares hit $346.43 on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

Google is certainly a good search engine, but I don't think I would bet my lunch money on its stock, not at those prices.