useit.com ![]() |
| Search |
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 | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
455 | 4,582 | 23,778 | 419% | ||
Yahoo | 2,482 | 3,698 | 5,402 | 10,895 | 102% |
Search.MSN | 68 | 1,636 | 3,534 | 116% | |
AltaVista | 771 | 3,033 | 5,015 | 3,188 | -36% |
Lycos | 211 | 163 | 2,586 | 2,266 | -12% |
Excite | 275 | 736 | 300 | 1,673 | 458% |
AskJeeves | 12 | 85 | 1,127 | 1,422 | 26% |
Mining Co./About | 73 | 312 | 1,184 | 1,062 | -10% |
GoTo | 25 | 85 | 136 | 634 | 366% |
Netscape Directory | 28 | 541 | 525 | -3% | |
Dogpile | 485 | 423 | -13% | ||
Go2Net | 159 | 387 | 675 | 350 | -48% |
Searchopolis | 296 | ||||
Findexe | 275 | ||||
Go/Infoseek | 1,304 | 2,266 | 1,769 | 253 | -86% |
DirectHit | 140 | 238 | 70% | ||
LookSmart | 194 | 388 | 393 | 236 | -40% |
Netfind.AOL | 51 | 72 | 514 | 220 | -57% |
Search.com/Snap | 12 | 653 | 536 | 212 | -60% |
RealNames | 19 | 25 | 127 | 408% | |
iWon | 57 | 123 | 116% | ||
Mamma | 4 | 32 | 90 | 97 | 8% |
Evreka | 65 | 27 | 65 | 141% | |
WebCrawler | 285 | 81 | 356 | 43 | -88% |
Kvasir | 18 | 7 | 11 | 57% | |
EuroSeek | 61 | 24 | 8 | 6 | -25% |
Newssearch.UserLand | 9 | 24 | 5 | -79% | |
Infind | 75 | 4 | -95% | ||
Savvysearch | 7 | 45 | -100% | ||
HotBot | 149 | 118 | (part of Lycos) | ||
Underhound | 93 | ||||
Metafind | 3 | 12 | |||
DevSearch | 144 | ||||
McKinley | 12 | ||||
Total | 6,227 | 12,907 | 27,678 | 51,961 | 88% |
For sake of comparison, here are referral statistics from some vertical portals:
March 1998 |
March 1999 |
March 2000 |
March 2001 |
|
---|---|---|---|---|
UsableWeb | 829 | 1,460 | 3,288 | 4,687 |
SlashDot | 193 | 1,391 | 3,005 | |
Builder.com | 13 | 623 | 662 | 1,080 |
Tomalak's Realm | 866 | 573 | 644 | |
WebWord | 64 | 124 | 425 | |
Scripting.com | 4 | 1,010 | 781 | 313 |
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 | |
---|---|---|
Yahoo | 28.7% | 43.4% |
AltaVista | 23.5% | 10.5% |
Go/Infoseek | 17.6% | 4.5% |
Excite | 5.7% | 22.3% |
Snap | 5.1% | 2.7% |
3.5% | * | |
LookSmart | 3.0% | 0.7% |
Go2Net | 3.0% | * |
Mining Co. | 2.4% | * |
Lycos | 1.3% | 1.8% |
HotBot | 0.9% | 3.0% |
Underhound | 0.7% | * |
GoTo | 0.7% | 2.0% |
AskJeeves | 0.7% | * |
WebCrawler | 0.6% | 3.6% |
Netfind.AOL | 0.6% | 0.2% |
Search.MSN | 0.5% | 3.0% |
Evreka | 0.5% | * |
Mamma | 0.3% | 0.5% |
Netscape Directory | 0.2% | * |
EuroSeek | 0.2% | 0.1% |
RealNames | 0.2% | * |
Kvasir | 0.1% | * |
Metafind | 0.1% | * |
Newssearch.UserLand | 0.1% | * |
Savvysearch | 0.1% | * |