I help run a popular music forum that gets over a million pageviews every month, and our search referral numbers show Google at 98.7%. The numbers are similar across 10 other domains I own.
I challenge anyone to show me a site that gets 30% of their search engine hits from Bing. Seriously, if your Bing stats are even close to 30%, please share with us.
I'll throw in some numbers too, we're on target for ~200m page views this month (74.8m in first 10 days of April) (2 sites, 60/40 traffic split) and we have:
site a - 66% search engine traffic. google is 98.5%, other is 1% and bing is 0.5%
site b - 76% search engine traffic. google is 97%, bing is 2% and other is 1%
Around 10% of our traffic is Internet Explorer. We're using google analytics (maybe they're fudging numbers? Seems v. unlikely) and search is a large part of where we get our traffic. Our experience matches yours very accurately in a completely different sector. These are gaming sites btw.
It may not be, though. We have good reason to believe that most IE6 users are using IE6 because it is the browser installed by IT on locked-down work computers. It doesn't seem unreasonable (to me) that a significant portion, though probably not a majority, of users of other versions of IE are similarly in work environments.
The point being, maybe IE users don't actually make up more than 10% of traffic. Maybe the situations in which people use IE are such that they use the web less. He did say 10% of traffic, not 10% of unique users.
Not that I have evidence to back this up; however, the kind of analysis that gets done on market share in computing doesn't seem to be able to accurately reflect how much something is actually used.
The point being, maybe IE users don't actually make up more than 10% of traffic. Maybe the situations in which people use IE are such that they use the web less. He did say 10% of traffic, not 10% of unique users.
I still don't believe this. I don't think that IE users are equal to or less than 10% of web traffic in the US or the world. That would be pretty huge if it was the case. Even a drop below 25% worldwide would be pretty huge news.
Quickly flicking through my analytics reports, I'm seeing IE percentages ranging from 84% (on an investment management site) down to 11% (a designer furniture site).
It wouldn't surprise me at all to see a youth oriented and/or computer gaming oriented site even further skewed away from IE than my furthest outlier.
Not to imply you don't realize this, but the proportion of web users who use IE is a different statistic from the proportion of web traffic from IE. It's very possible that the proportion of web traffic coming from IE is significantly lower than the proportion of web users that use IE, and in fact, I'd guess it's fairly likely to be the case since heavy web users are probably more likely to use Firefox, Chrome, Opera, etc. than an average web user.
Now, I too would be very surprised if that observation brings 45% of web users down to under 10% of web traffic, but I don't doubt that web traffic from IE is lower than 45%.
I don't see anything on their site about where the statistics come from (though I barely looked) but Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers ) cites the 45% statistic from StatCounter as "usage share" and defines "usage share" as "the proportion of users of all web browsers who use that particular browser."
Can't say with any amount of confidence that Wikipedia is defining it correctly and/or using the statistics correctly, but there that is...
"StatCounter is a web analytics service. As of 1 June 2010, our tracking code is installed on more than 3 million sites globally. (These sites cover various activities and geographic locations.) Every month, we record billions of hits to these sites. For each hit, we analyse the browser/operating system used and we establish if the hit is from a mobile device. For our search engine stats, we analyze every hit referred by a search engine. For our social media stats, we analyze every hit referred by a social media site. We summarize all this data and this is how we get our Global Stats information.
We do not manipulate the data in any way. We do not collate it with any other information sources. No artificial weightings are used. We simply publish the data as we record it.
In other words we calculate our Global Stats on the basis of more than 15 billion hits per month, by people from all over the world onto our 3 million+ member sites."
The only thing they talk about are hits, and they mention it extensively. Maybe they do some analysis to determine unique users, but if so they don't mention it, and that would seem to be a pretty big oversight. That's why I said as best I can tell they use page hits.
UPDATE: I went to the Wikipedia link you provided and it says this: "StatCounter (July 2008 to present)
Usage share of web browsers according to Stat Counter.
Statcounter statistics are directly derived from hits (not unique visitors) from 3 million sites using Statcounter totalling more than 15 billion hits per month.[22] No artificial weightings are used"
Speaking of...does wikipedia list their web traffic numbers? It seems like they would have a pretty good representation of the public knocking on their door.
Indeed. I asked the same question earlier to the sound of crickets. Hitwise has, in the past, presented Wikipedia hits from search engines, but the last was 2007, so its not really useful for comparison.
Hitwise is a reputed source of data. Their whole business depends on the accuracy and reliability of the numbers they report. Questioning their numbers based on your personal experience when your domain is not representative of the general internet traffic is too amateurish.
The trend of bing making slow and steady gains is confirmed by a bunch of other such sites as well.
Bing is far from being a credible competitor but lets give them credit for what they have achieved.
To my surprise, for March, Bing is at 15% and Yahoo is at 11% for BCC organic searches. My demographic is older, female-r, and more middle American than most of y'alls are. (Even with that, I cannot remember BingHoo being above 20% in years.)
I'm not specifically aware of anything material which would have materially affected BCC's performance on BingHoo in the last 3 months, and the big candidate for affecting performance at Google (Panda or whatever you guys call content farming internally) largely seems to have missed me. When you compare year-to-year to back out the seasonality, though, both Yahoo and Bing show strong growth in my Jan/Feb/March numbers and Google growth is much more muted. Feel free to backchannel me if you want the spreadsheet.
For reasons known only to the Excel gods, the X axis considers the last data point (March) to be in February.
I suspect that if you wanted a job at Google it would not be terribly difficult for you to get one. ;-)
Anyway, I bet there's probably somebody in search quality whose job it is to track these numbers, but I don't know who it is, and it's easier just to ask you. Plus, this way the HN community gets some interesting numbers. Thanks. :-)
That could happen for many other reasons, e.g. your relative ranking in either engine for particular keywords, the types of user that visits each engine, and so on.
As ever, statistics published by the likes of Hitwise can only offer a partial view of the truth, and have been shown to be grossly inaccurate in the past.
Its certain that these are only estimates, however, Bing has been growing in market share consistently for quite some time now. If memory serves correctly, they have had month over month improvement for at least the last 6 months, if not longer. Bing was around 6% when it "launched." Not sure exactly what Yahoo! was at then, but it didn't sum to 30. Initially, Bing grabbed share primarily from Yahoo! searches, but more recently it looks like more has come from Google (though it hasn't been that significant). Interestingly, Bing even grew in January when it was accused on "copying" results.
Point being, while doubting the accuracy of the numbers reported is reasonable, I find it much harder to dismiss a trend.
I'm not here to defend Hitwise, but your assertion is bogus. Its roughly equivalent to the author of today's HN Funnel Analysis post[1] claiming there's no way 40% of the internet uses IE because his site only sees 4% IE.
Maybe Bing just doesn't like your site. I've worked with many properties that ranked top 3 in Yahoo/Bing yet were all but invisible on Google (not banned, just not ranking well), and vice versa. Especially on long tail terms, which forums like yours usually thrive on, its not uncommon to see a big separation.
One explanation could be that your users are highly technical when compared to the average pc user. I would bet the ground google lost went to new pc buyers that are happy using default apps/settings.
These kinds of people probably wouldn't visit your site.
Last month I have is February unfortunately, but showing just under 400k search engine referrals with about 66% from Google and 16% Bing for a video-centric site.
I have access to a couple of sites that get > 1 million visits a month...one hospital system site and one suite of home decor magazine sites. Fairly 'normal' user demographics. For both sites, Bing and Yahoo are at around 8% each. Google's at 80%.
Looked at about 30 other sites we run (everything from personal injury attorneys to truck scales to HVAC companies to bariatric surgeons)...traffic from Bing is no higher than 9% and no lower than 3%.
I run a website for an association. Our visitors are solidly corporate types (with 10% still using IE6). For March, 90% of our search traffic came from Google.
So first of all, the demographics may be at play here.
Second of all, if yahoo is "powered by bing" that basically means that bing in itself did not win anything, they just took an entire existing user base and replaced one engine with another. Its like if secretly all ford engines were replaced with toyota ones, and toyota claims to have gained market share. Its true technically, but on a user level its not users flocking to them, its just the fact of life that happened due to a takeover. Note yahoo allowed paying to get better rankings, so those who used it were already used to shit results.
Comments
These numbers are bogus, as far as I can tell.
I help run a popular music forum that gets over a million pageviews every month, and our search referral numbers show Google at 98.7%. The numbers are similar across 10 other domains I own.
I challenge anyone to show me a site that gets 30% of their search engine hits from Bing. Seriously, if your Bing stats are even close to 30%, please share with us.
I'll throw in some numbers too, we're on target for ~200m page views this month (74.8m in first 10 days of April) (2 sites, 60/40 traffic split) and we have:
site a - 66% search engine traffic. google is 98.5%, other is 1% and bing is 0.5%
site b - 76% search engine traffic. google is 97%, bing is 2% and other is 1%
Around 10% of our traffic is Internet Explorer. We're using google analytics (maybe they're fudging numbers? Seems v. unlikely) and search is a large part of where we get our traffic. Our experience matches yours very accurately in a completely different sector. These are gaming sites btw.
Around 10% of our traffic is Internet Explorer
This should already tell you that your traffic is not representative.
It may not be, though. We have good reason to believe that most IE6 users are using IE6 because it is the browser installed by IT on locked-down work computers. It doesn't seem unreasonable (to me) that a significant portion, though probably not a majority, of users of other versions of IE are similarly in work environments.
The point being, maybe IE users don't actually make up more than 10% of traffic. Maybe the situations in which people use IE are such that they use the web less. He did say 10% of traffic, not 10% of unique users.
Not that I have evidence to back this up; however, the kind of analysis that gets done on market share in computing doesn't seem to be able to accurately reflect how much something is actually used.
The point being, maybe IE users don't actually make up more than 10% of traffic. Maybe the situations in which people use IE are such that they use the web less. He did say 10% of traffic, not 10% of unique users.
I still don't believe this. I don't think that IE users are equal to or less than 10% of web traffic in the US or the world. That would be pretty huge if it was the case. Even a drop below 25% worldwide would be pretty huge news.
In aggregate, sure.
Quickly flicking through my analytics reports, I'm seeing IE percentages ranging from 84% (on an investment management site) down to 11% (a designer furniture site).
It wouldn't surprise me at all to see a youth oriented and/or computer gaming oriented site even further skewed away from IE than my furthest outlier.
Not to imply you don't realize this, but the proportion of web users who use IE is a different statistic from the proportion of web traffic from IE. It's very possible that the proportion of web traffic coming from IE is significantly lower than the proportion of web users that use IE, and in fact, I'd guess it's fairly likely to be the case since heavy web users are probably more likely to use Firefox, Chrome, Opera, etc. than an average web user.
Now, I too would be very surprised if that observation brings 45% of web users down to under 10% of web traffic, but I don't doubt that web traffic from IE is lower than 45%.
As best I can tell StatCounter counts traffic (page hits). It still has IE at around 45% worldwide, and slightly higher in the US.
Of course this neglects things like bandwidth via Netflix and Youtube, but still a decent proxy.
http://gs.statcounter.com/
I don't see anything on their site about where the statistics come from (though I barely looked) but Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers ) cites the 45% statistic from StatCounter as "usage share" and defines "usage share" as "the proportion of users of all web browsers who use that particular browser."
Can't say with any amount of confidence that Wikipedia is defining it correctly and/or using the statistics correctly, but there that is...
This is what the site says:
"StatCounter is a web analytics service. As of 1 June 2010, our tracking code is installed on more than 3 million sites globally. (These sites cover various activities and geographic locations.) Every month, we record billions of hits to these sites. For each hit, we analyse the browser/operating system used and we establish if the hit is from a mobile device. For our search engine stats, we analyze every hit referred by a search engine. For our social media stats, we analyze every hit referred by a social media site. We summarize all this data and this is how we get our Global Stats information.
We do not manipulate the data in any way. We do not collate it with any other information sources. No artificial weightings are used. We simply publish the data as we record it.
In other words we calculate our Global Stats on the basis of more than 15 billion hits per month, by people from all over the world onto our 3 million+ member sites."
The only thing they talk about are hits, and they mention it extensively. Maybe they do some analysis to determine unique users, but if so they don't mention it, and that would seem to be a pretty big oversight. That's why I said as best I can tell they use page hits.
UPDATE: I went to the Wikipedia link you provided and it says this: "StatCounter (July 2008 to present) Usage share of web browsers according to Stat Counter. Statcounter statistics are directly derived from hits (not unique visitors) from 3 million sites using Statcounter totalling more than 15 billion hits per month.[22] No artificial weightings are used"
This seems consistent with what I said earlier.
Speaking of...does wikipedia list their web traffic numbers? It seems like they would have a pretty good representation of the public knocking on their door.
Indeed. I asked the same question earlier to the sound of crickets. Hitwise has, in the past, presented Wikipedia hits from search engines, but the last was 2007, so its not really useful for comparison.
I found it. http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOrigi...
google.com = 146,718,000 refers bing.com = 5,592,000 refers
Hitwise is a reputed source of data. Their whole business depends on the accuracy and reliability of the numbers they report. Questioning their numbers based on your personal experience when your domain is not representative of the general internet traffic is too amateurish.
The trend of bing making slow and steady gains is confirmed by a bunch of other such sites as well.
Bing is far from being a credible competitor but lets give them credit for what they have achieved.
To my surprise, for March, Bing is at 15% and Yahoo is at 11% for BCC organic searches. My demographic is older, female-r, and more middle American than most of y'alls are. (Even with that, I cannot remember BingHoo being above 20% in years.)
When did it jump up? Do you know of anything they did that'd make them suddenly more popular?
You guys should hire me for SEO consulting if you can't answer this one in-house. ;)
Jokes aside: BingHoo share, followed by comparison to Google (which makes it harder to see).
http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/nostra-an...
http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/nostra-an...
I'm not specifically aware of anything material which would have materially affected BCC's performance on BingHoo in the last 3 months, and the big candidate for affecting performance at Google (Panda or whatever you guys call content farming internally) largely seems to have missed me. When you compare year-to-year to back out the seasonality, though, both Yahoo and Bing show strong growth in my Jan/Feb/March numbers and Google growth is much more muted. Feel free to backchannel me if you want the spreadsheet.
For reasons known only to the Excel gods, the X axis considers the last data point (March) to be in February.
I suspect that if you wanted a job at Google it would not be terribly difficult for you to get one. ;-)
Anyway, I bet there's probably somebody in search quality whose job it is to track these numbers, but I don't know who it is, and it's easier just to ask you. Plus, this way the HN community gets some interesting numbers. Thanks. :-)
Could it be something to do with IE9 or new OS installs leading people to give Bing a shot?
We're at 26% in the business review space...
Yes, I think it depends on your target audience.
That could happen for many other reasons, e.g. your relative ranking in either engine for particular keywords, the types of user that visits each engine, and so on.
As ever, statistics published by the likes of Hitwise can only offer a partial view of the truth, and have been shown to be grossly inaccurate in the past.
Its certain that these are only estimates, however, Bing has been growing in market share consistently for quite some time now. If memory serves correctly, they have had month over month improvement for at least the last 6 months, if not longer. Bing was around 6% when it "launched." Not sure exactly what Yahoo! was at then, but it didn't sum to 30. Initially, Bing grabbed share primarily from Yahoo! searches, but more recently it looks like more has come from Google (though it hasn't been that significant). Interestingly, Bing even grew in January when it was accused on "copying" results.
Point being, while doubting the accuracy of the numbers reported is reasonable, I find it much harder to dismiss a trend.
I'm not here to defend Hitwise, but your assertion is bogus. Its roughly equivalent to the author of today's HN Funnel Analysis post[1] claiming there's no way 40% of the internet uses IE because his site only sees 4% IE.
Maybe Bing just doesn't like your site. I've worked with many properties that ranked top 3 in Yahoo/Bing yet were all but invisible on Google (not banned, just not ranking well), and vice versa. Especially on long tail terms, which forums like yours usually thrive on, its not uncommon to see a big separation.
[1] http://blog.effectcheck.com/2011/04/11/hackernews-front-page...
My stats show greater than 97% of search traffic is from Google; that's aggregated across a handful of web sites and applications.
One explanation could be that your users are highly technical when compared to the average pc user. I would bet the ground google lost went to new pc buyers that are happy using default apps/settings.
These kinds of people probably wouldn't visit your site.
Last month I have is February unfortunately, but showing just under 400k search engine referrals with about 66% from Google and 16% Bing for a video-centric site.
What about the trends? Is Google losing ground?
I have access to a couple of sites that get > 1 million visits a month...one hospital system site and one suite of home decor magazine sites. Fairly 'normal' user demographics. For both sites, Bing and Yahoo are at around 8% each. Google's at 80%.
Looked at about 30 other sites we run (everything from personal injury attorneys to truck scales to HVAC companies to bariatric surgeons)...traffic from Bing is no higher than 9% and no lower than 3%.
I run a website for an association. Our visitors are solidly corporate types (with 10% still using IE6). For March, 90% of our search traffic came from Google.
So first of all, the demographics may be at play here.
Second of all, if yahoo is "powered by bing" that basically means that bing in itself did not win anything, they just took an entire existing user base and replaced one engine with another. Its like if secretly all ford engines were replaced with toyota ones, and toyota claims to have gained market share. Its true technically, but on a user level its not users flocking to them, its just the fact of life that happened due to a takeover. Note yahoo allowed paying to get better rankings, so those who used it were already used to shit results.