Top 20 search engines in the UK( Neilsen//Netratings )

Number of click throughs per searcher shown in brackets.
Rank by number of unique searchers shown on the right.

1. Google (17.9) 1
2. Yahoo! (14.5) 2
3. AltaVista (13.6) 15
4. Tiscali (7.8) 12
5. My Way (6.0) 6
6. MSN (5.5) 4
7. Wanadoo (5.5) 10
8. Lycos (4.8) 16
9. Ask Jeeves (4.5) 3
10. Dogpile.com (2.7) 18
11. AOL (2.3) 7
12. Lycos Europe (2.0) 13
13. YELL.com (1.6) 13 9
14. Search the Web! (1.5) 19
15. DealTime (1.2) 11
16. Kelkoo (1.1) 5
17. NexTag (1.0) 8
18. WebFetch (0.5) 14
19. Shopping.com (0.5) 20
20. Info.com (0.4) 17


Let's make sense out of these figures now:

If I have to pay for each visitor coming to my site, I want a visitor who doesn't spend his time browsing my competitors: basically, if a visitor is "worth" let's say £100 of purchase, and visit 10 shops, the absolute value of each visit is worth £10.

Now if the same searcher visits only 2 shops, his "absolute" value is now £50 for each visit.

To demonstrate that, let's take a very small population of competitors: shop 1 (my shop), shop 2, shop 3. Let's run the test in two environments : search engine 1 ( 3 clicks through in average), and search engine 2 ( 1 click through in average). let's finally say that 9 searchers querying both search engine 1 and search engine 2.

In the first one, statistically, my visitor has visited my shop (shop 1), but shop 2 & shop 3 as well. On the other end, I get the 9 searchers to visit my shop.

In the second one, my visitor has not visited other shops than mine. On the other end, I only get 3 searchers out of 9 who will visit my shop.

Now do you prefer 3 visits from searchers who will not visit any other competitors, or 9 searcher who compare your products with all your other competitors.. You don't have to choose. The point here is that both search engines are worth consideration.