Vincent Gable’s Blog

February 9, 2009

Google Monoculture

Filed under: Announcement | , , , , ,
― Vincent Gable on February 9, 2009

Jeff Atwood remarked,

Google delivers 350x the traffic to Stack Overflow that the next best so-called “search engine” does. Three hundred and fifty times!

All I can say is that’s a Belgium big number!

Here’s his data:

Search Engine Visits
Google 3,417,919
Yahoo 9,779
Live 5,638
Search 2,961
AOL 1,274
Ask 1,186
MSN 1,177
Altavista 202
Yandex 191
Seznam 103

The server logs for vgable.com, for 2008, show google giving me a much more modest 3.6x of my traffic.

13 different refering search engines Pages Percent Hits Percent
Google 3039 72.8 % 3047 72.3 %
Windows Live 1055 25.3 % 1055 25 %
Google (Images) 40 0.9 % 41 0.9 %
Yahoo! 12 0.2 % 12 0.2 %
MSN Search 7 0.1 % 7 0.1 %
Unknown search engines 4 0 % 4 0 %
Google (cache) 3 0 % 35 0.8 %
Scroogle 3 0 % 3 0 %
del.icio.us (Social Bookmark) 2 0 % 2 0 %
AOL 1 0 % 1 0 %
Clusty 1 0 % 1 0 %
Dogpile 1 0 % 1 0 %
AltaVista 1 0 % 1 0 %

Of course, having 3.6x as much market share as everyone else combined is still market domination.

I can’t speculate why the numbers for my niche website are different from Attwood’s niche website (especially w.r.t Live Search).

But Yahoo’s consistently irrelevant 0.3% and 0.2% of referrals looks especially bad for them. Google has too few competitors.

More Terms = More Specific (Assume AND, not OR)

Filed under: Design,Programming,Quotes,Usability | , ,
― Vincent Gable on February 9, 2009

Assumed-And is the way Google does it, with the more search terms added, the narrower the results. The other way around can be argued in the abstract, but your customers are not living in the abstract. The world has voted, and Assumed-And is the way it is. Having additional terms widen, rather than narrow, the scope confuses people in the extreme. They will leave you and find a site with a search function that “works.” This blunder alone could put a company out of business.

—Bruce Tognazzini

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