Statistics for Traffic Referred by Search Engines and Navigation Directories to Useit

by Jakob Nielsen (April 2, 2001)

The following table shows the number of visits that have been recorded in the Useit server logs as coming from search engines and directory services (so-called "portals") in the months of March 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2001. The true number of visits is slightly larger since some browsers don't report accurate referrer URLs. Also note that the number of users is likely to be smaller than the number of visits since people sometimes use multiple search engines or repeat a search.

Portals and search engines accounted for about 20% of the "unique visitors" to useit.com. In comparison, the HypertextNow site gets 30-40% of its visitors from portals and search engines.

Overall search-engine-driven traffic increased by 88% during the last year. This is to be expected since use of the Internet almost doubled during the year. It is more interesting to look at the large variations in traffic growth from the individual search engines.

Traffic to a site from a search engine depends on three factors:

The most interesting observations from the table are:

The type of statistics shown in this table may be seen as a leading indicator for the future of portal companies: their ability to guide users to high-quality content is likely to influence their future use since people will tend to stay with services that give them good results and will tend to recommend the good services to their friends. Services that do not succeed in guiding users to good pages may suffer a drop in usage over the long term since people will change service when they discover a better one.

  
 March
1998
March
1999
March
2000
March
2001
Growth
2000-2001
Google 4554,58223,778419%
Yahoo2,4823,6985,40210,895102%
Search.MSN 681,6363,534116%
AltaVista7713,0335,0153,188-36%
Lycos2111632,5862,266-12%
Excite2757363001,673458%
AskJeeves12851,1271,42226%
Mining Co./About733121,1841,062-10%
GoTo2585136634366%
Netscape Directory 28541525-3%
Dogpile  485423-13%
Go2Net159387675350-48%
Searchopolis   296 
Findexe   275 
Go/Infoseek1,3042,2661,769253-86%
DirectHit  14023870%
LookSmart194388393236-40%
Netfind.AOL5172514220-57%
Search.com/Snap12653536212-60%
RealNames 1925127408%
iWon  57123116%
Mamma43290978%
Evreka 652765141%
WebCrawler2858135643-88%
Kvasir 1871157%
EuroSeek612486-25%
Newssearch.UserLand 9245-79%
Infind  754-95%
Savvysearch 745-100%
HotBot149118(part of Lycos) 
Underhound 93   
Metafind312   
DevSearch144   
McKinley12    
Total6,22712,907 27,678 51,96188%

Number of visits referred by navigation services during one-month periods.

For sake of comparison, here are referral statistics from some vertical portals:
 March
1998
March
1999
March
2000
March
2001
UsableWeb8291,4603,2884,687
SlashDot 1931,3913,005
Builder.com136236621,080
Tomalak's Realm 866573644
WebWord 64124425
Scripting.com41,010781313

It does not make sense to compute growth rates for the vertical portals since the number of referred visits depends on their editorial decisions in any individual month (how much to link to my articles).

The next table compares the referral statistics to useit in 1999 with general referral statistics for a large sample of the Web at StatMarket during the same period.

 to
useit
across
the Web
Yahoo28.7%43.4%
AltaVista23.5%10.5%
Go/Infoseek17.6%4.5%
Excite5.7%22.3%
Snap5.1%2.7%
Google3.5%*
LookSmart3.0%0.7%
Go2Net3.0%*
Mining Co.2.4%*
Lycos1.3%1.8%
HotBot0.9%3.0%
Underhound0.7%*
GoTo0.7%2.0%
AskJeeves0.7%*
WebCrawler0.6%3.6%
Netfind.AOL0.6%0.2%
Search.MSN0.5%3.0%
Evreka0.5%*
Mamma0.3%0.5%
Netscape Directory0.2%*
EuroSeek0.2%0.1%
RealNames0.2%*
Kvasir0.1%*
Metafind0.1%*
Newssearch.UserLand0.1%*
Savvysearch0.1%*

Proportion of referrals from various navigation services to useit and on the Web in general in early 1999. A * indicates missing data.