Enquisite: New Search Market Share Data

Traffic is controversial.

With so much riding on market share and momentum, web traffic has become highly politicized. One recent example of that was when Hitwise issued a press release that MySpace had surpassed Yahoo! Mail as the most visited US domain online. This drew a prompt response from Yahoo!, which issued its own release seeking to clarify the numbers and reaffirm that it was the number #1 US destination online.

There was also a lot of coverage and discussion about Nielsen and comScore data that seemed to show that Google’s momentum and market share growth had stalled and that Yahoo! had gained slightly. The three different analytics leaders routinely have different numbers for Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Directionally, however, they tend to be the same.

All these numbers need to be considered in the aggregate and with an eye toward longer term trends. But I was sent some interesting data from a small sample of sites coming out of Enquisite, a new free analytics tool that launched last month and has gained rapid adoption.

The data, drawn from a preliminary and small sample, show a much more skewed market share distribution than what is otherwise out in the public domain:

• Google — 78.06%
• Yahoo – 10.20%
• MSN – 6.09%
• Google Images — 1.28%
• AOL — 0.68%
• Ask — 0.59%

Again, this is a small sample (you can read all the qualifications on the Enquisite Blog) but it’s interesting to consider and why these numbers may be so much more dramatic than the others in the marketplace.