The mashups of our Top Alternative Search Engines list continue! Charles
Knight spotted a great post by the Search The Web 2.0 blog, which took the top 100 and attempted to rank them
by market share. The reason for this ambitious undertaking was a comment that
Charles made when we
first published the list:
“…people actually use four main search engines for 99.99% of their
searches: Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com (in that order).”
Well it turns out the figure is closer to 95.45%, and that’s counting AOL too!
🙂 Check out the
actual blog post for the full table, with market share for each of the 100
alt search engines and more. But I especially liked these two summary graphs:
The above graph (large
version here) shows the long tail of search engines, which is so small
because Google, Yahoo et al are so dominant.
This graph (large
version) shows the long tail “under a microscope (using a semi-log
plot)”. As SearchTheWeb2 explains, “it clearly shows that the long
tail for the alternative search engines is again dominated by a few such as AOL,
Digg and Del.icio.us”.
Great stuff! Keep the mashups coming – you can find the other mashups, as
well as Charles Knight’s original Alt Search Engine posts, on his
R/WW profile page.
