Nielsen-NetRatings Search Engine Loyalty Study

February 28, 2005 · by · in Search Engines

Nielsen-NetRatings released its latest study showing that searchers use multiple search engines. For example, the study says “58 percent of Google searchers also visited at least one of the other top two search engines, MSN Search and Yahoo! Search… Nearly 71 percent of those who searched at Yahoo! also visited at least one of the other top two search engines, and 70 percent of those who searched at MSN also tried their luck at one or both of the other two.” I’ve recently been experimenting myself while watching the search engines index this new blog. While Google has the best sorting algorithm, I’ve noticed that it has been acting a little strange recently. Meanwhile, Yahoo’s and MSN’s sorting algorithm have been noticeably inferior, and they generally seem to index fewer pages than Google—BUT, they have been delivering results that Google has missed entirely. So the lesson remains clear to me. Although Google remains the juggernaut, it’s not complete, and other search engines can be a useful supplement.