Official Google Blog: At a loss for words?
Is this the end of search the tail?
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Six Months with Six Milestones
As you’ve already noticed, this blog space hasn’t had a single post in the last six months until now. During this period, six achievements have been made for this search engine. It’s not only completed a domain change from SearchTheWeb2.com to SearchTheTail.com but
also achieved five other milestones.
- Completion of Domain Change. The initial domain name, SearchTheWeb2.com, changed to Tynto.com and then to SearchTheTail.com to reflect to the purpose of the search engine: Search the Long Tail or Google Tail, Google Search with a Tail.
- Search In 11 Languages. You can use SearchTheTail to search under 11 different languages: English, Deutsch, Français, Español, Italia, Portugal, 中文简体, 日本語, Dutch, Tiếng Việt, العربية .
- Users From Over 100 Countries. SearchTheTail’s users are all over the world. Visitors from the top 20 countries recently visited in the last 30 days are shown in the below image.
The above table shows that the EU has taken over the North America in terms of visitors to dominate the SearchTheTail traffics. The financial reward has also reflected this observation.
- 2 Million Page Views a Month. As of today, the site has reached two million page views a month. This achievement is partially due to a contribution from several small search engines such as baidu.com, soho.com, my.att.net, mywebsearch.com, suche.freenet.de, suche.t-online.de, icq.com, etc.
- Top 5-digit World Ranking Site. Based on Alexa ranking system, searchthetail.com was placed under 100,000 for the last three-month traffic average. Under Comcast's estimation, searchthetail.com has been ranked at 38,000 for the US traffics in Feb 28, 2008.
- Top Ranking for Several Search Terms. The site is also currently ranking at #1 or 2 for several search terms: long tail search engine, Search the Tail, Google Tail, Search Tail, SearchTheTail, etc.
“Six months with six milestones” is a good achievement but the search development is still a long way to go. Our ultimate milestone is to have 1% of global search market share.
Sunday, August 5, 2007
Rankings- The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines for August
This post is to update the current rankings for the top 100 alternative search engines that have been monthly edited by Charles S. Knight of AltSearchEngines. The rankings should be used for a purpose of relative comparison among these alternative search engines since they are based on many assumptions that may be no longer true or have been changed. This update is overdue. The last post on ranking was in Feb 2007.
Global Update
The August list of the top 100 alternative search engines consists of many search engines from different countries and languages. Thus, ranking for these search engines should be based on a global format. A global ranking for both known and unknown search engines in the world wide web has been examined using Zipfian distribution in this post. The final distribution (graph) is reproduced here.
The above graph shows that answers.com, the only alternative search engine, is in the top 10 and is close to 1% of the global search market share (0.75 %). Total search share of the remainders (99 engines) is less than 1% and rankings are from 23rd to 756th. The graph also indicates that number of global search engines is close 1000.
SEngines Big4 | Search Engines Google.com | Search Engines Google.com | Share % 60.5000 | Daily Searches 490,303,450 |
Global Search Traffics for the Big 4, top 100 Alternatives and missing search engines are illustrated in the graph shown below.
Technorati Profile
Zipf's Law for the Global Search Market Share & Rankings
This post is intended to propose a new method to estimate the Global search market share for all search engines based on the Zipf's law. The estimated share for the US search market has been provided and updated monthly by several sources. For example, the estimated share of the number of searches that happened in the United States in May 2007 as shown in the below table.
SEngines | comScore | NetRatings | Hitwise | Average |
The above table also gives the average share for each major search engines based on three sources. Based on these average share percentages, the search share for other search engines (other than the big four) are about 6.89% for the month of May 2007.
For the Global Market, the statistics are not this simple. Quite a few numbers have been bouncing around lately in terms of search share. On a global basis, comScore estimates Google held a 65.7 percent share of the Web search market while Richard Zwicky at Enquisite reported that Global share was about 73.8 % with excluded US and Canada markets.
Zipf's Law Application
Zipf's law can be presented by a plot with the axes being log(rank order) in the x-axis and log(frequency) in the y-axis. If the points are close to a single straight line, the distribution follows Zipf's law.
If we assume that global market share for all known and unknown search engines in the world is followed Zip's law, what should this global market share be?
A graph of 4 major (Google, Yahoo, MSN & Ask) and 100 alternative search engines selected and maintained by Charles Knight is shown as below.
The graph was constructed by plotting log(market share) vs. log(rank order). Market share for each engine is based on various sources of estimations and then normalized based on the Google share that can be assumed at any percentage. A constraint will be that total of all search shares from these search engines should be at 100%.
The result graph shows that the data points are not on a straight line. The reason of this behavior is that there are many missing search engines in the data set. Although most of these missing search engines can't be known but some such as Baidu, AOL, Yandex, AltaVista, Naver, etc. can be added to the data. If these search engines are added, a straight line with a slope of -2 is clearly taken place. As Charles Knight mentioned in his blog, the top 100 alternative search engines have been selected among a data base of 1000 engines. Fortunately, not every search engine needs to be identified in this study. A plot can be constructed without their identities as shown below.
ConclusionsZipf's law can be used to approximate the Global search market share for all known and unknown search engines. Global search market share currently follows a Zipfian distribution with slope of -2 and an intercept point (Google share) at 60.5 % as June 2007. There are approximated 1000 search engines in the world with a daily search traffic of 880 millions.
Thursday, May 3, 2007
After Four Months Online: Two Good One Bad
Two good and one bad were happen to SearchTheWeb2.com on May 1 after it has been online for the last four months.
The first good thing is that SearchTheWeb2.com has its first Google PageRank (PR). PR of its home page has jumped from 0 to 5. Most of the pages that it links to have a PR4. Some of you may ask what is Google PageRank and why is it important? According to Google, "PageRank reflects Google's view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that Google believes are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results." PageRank has a range of 0 to 10, based on log scale in which a page with PR4 can be 10 times of importance as a page with PR3. Any page on a new website will receive a PR0 whereas Google.com/index.html has a perfect 10 PR. You can see the page's PR from a green indicator in your Internet Explorer toolbar if you have installed Google Toolbar. For Firefox users, you can use this. If you don't have the toolbar installed you can still check any page PR using one of these sites. Please, note that PR value you see on the Toolbar may be out of date or not the same as the PR which Google currently uses to rank the page in its index.
The second good thing is that SearchTheWeb2 has been selected again as one of the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines for the fourth time in the last four months.
Now, the bad thing is the site is expected to be under some sorts of penalty since its traffic is sharply down in the last couple of days. The keywords which the site was used to rank at the top of Google first page result, now ranks at 50 or higher. Is this the same as “the classic minus 30”? So it should be called “the minus 50 penalty” instead. The classic -30 penalty is believed to be manually applied and still is a mystery. Its penalization affects every page on the site and for every keyword.
However, one positive for Searchtheweb2.com is that a search of "searchtheweb2.com" still gives the site at the top while such a search in “the -30 penalty” would return the home page at the top of page 4 (#31).
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Local Map Search for SearchTheWeb2
A local map search option has been added to SearchTheWeb2.com. This is a Google Maps Search with popular and long tail queries for refinement. A list of long tail & popular terms will be generated once the first search was made from the top search box.
You may have already noticed, there are two search boxes on this page. If you use the top box to search, a complete package of search will be generated. This package includes Google map with local businesses, web search results and keyword lists of popular and long tail. The bottom search will give a return of local map search only.
If you click on any keyword on the keyword list, a new search (Google map & web results) will appear. To do a local map search effectively, location should be included but without any comma in your query.
Sunday, April 1, 2007
April Fools in 2007
I don’t know whether these announcements are for real or not but today is the first of April so I classified them as April fools.
1. TechCrunch Has Acquired FuckedCompany.com This announcement did fool a lot of TechCrunch’s readers. The reason of this may be due to one day early of the announcement. I think this is the best of all fools.
2. Google announces free in-home wireless broadband service (Google TiSP):
TiSP in-home wireless broadband is:
- Free, fast and highly reliable
- Easy to install -- takes just minutes
- Vacuum-sealed to prevent water damage
There is also a press release. I think it is funny.
3. Google Paper is a new feature being promoted on the Gmail home page. You click a request and Google will deliver paper through a normal mail. It’s free since the mailing fee is offset with the help of relevant, targeted, unobtrusive advertisements, which will appear on the back of your Gmail Paper prints.
4. Jim Lanzone Video Announcement: Kevin Federline's Search With Kevin service is being acquired and merged with Ask, to create Ask Kevin. This fools no one.
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Global Search Market Share in 2007
We know that Google search engine is dominating the Global search market. But, how big is Google's domination of internet search market? Based on the most current and available data from various sources below, a graph was developed to illustrate this domination.
Global Search Engine Market as of January 2007
This graph shows market shares for four major search engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN/Live and Ask in forms of areas. Global search market is presented as a big red circle while a smaller white oval shows the US search market.
Will Google eat them all and completely control the future internet search market? Will it survive with this domination or perish due to a blowup? What do you think?
Sources:
1. Nielsen//NetRatings' Burmaster:
256 million people visited a search engine in December 2006 – 81% of the global Internet population.
Google's audience has grown almost 2.5 times the rate of search's – continuing to eat into the share held by its competitors.
2. Enquisite's Zwicky: From January 20 to February 12, 2007, Google's share of the global search engine market dipped to 67.1%, it slipped to 76.1% in the UK, and slid to 76.9% in France. Yahoo had a 14.9%, rise to 8.3% in the UK, and improve to 5.3% in France.
3. US Market:
Sources | comScore | NetRatings |
4. US Market vs. Global Market:
Google Users in United States = 30.7%.
Growth in Searches per Searcher, February 2006
Date | Monthly Searches/Searcher | Daily Searches/Searcher |
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Adsense for Search vs Google Custom Search
One of the changes we made last week was to replace AdSense for Search by Google Custom Search for Google search result integration.
According to the feedbacks we received, our search result pages had been blocked by some corporations due to some unknown reasons. We discovered that the reason may due to the integration of "AdSense for Search" to search results Once we changed the integration to Google Custom Search, this blockage disappeared. We still don't know why.
There are some differences between Search Engine using Adsense for Search and Custom Search Engine:
Powered by Google. A search engine using Adsense for Search can use this term while a Google custom search engine can’t . The term Google Custom Search must be used unless its result pages were hosted by Google.
AdSense Ad Channels. A search engine using Adsense for Search can have many channels. We have not checked the limit but we believe it’s about 200. Google Custom search engine has only one channel.
Number of Search Sites: A search engine using Adsense for Search can search on either a single site or entire web but Google Custom Search has no limit on number of sites it can include to search.
There are also other differences but we don't mention here since they do not apply to SearchTheWeb2.com.
Tuesday, February 6, 2007
Rankings: The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines
(Updated) This post is to introduce the current rankings for the top 100 alternative search engines that were introduced by Charles S. Knight, SEO. The rankings should be used for a purpose of relative comparison among these alternative search engines since they are based on many assumptions that may not be true.
The top 100 list was first appeared under title “Top 100+ Search Engines“ (Jan 3, 2007) and then it was modified for The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines on Jan 29, 2007. Our SearchTheWeb2 is on both lists even this new search engine was less than two weeks old.
Estimated Search Shares for the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines
The online search market is dominated by the big four: Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com. In the second article, Charles wrote that “market research shows that people actually use four main search engines for 99.99% of their searches” Is 99.99% this true number of percentage? Nobody know the true number but there were several numbers around. Let's have a look at the estimated share of the number of searches that happened in the United States in October 2006 from various sources as shown in the below table.
Month | comScore | NetRatings | Hitwise | Average |
Ranking
The average shares from the above table and our inhouse stats were used to estimate the search rankings and share percentage for each alternative search engines. The results are shown in the below table. Note that the total percentage of all listed search engines is less than 100% due to the market shares of the unlisted search engines that did not make the list. Daily searches for each alternative search engine based on a total daily online searches of 250 miilions are also listed in the table for comparison.
Estimated Search Shares by Various Search Engines as of Feb 2007 from SearchTheWeb2.com
ESt. | Search www.digg.com www.local.com www.ditto.com www.liveplasma.com www.mojeek.com www.speegle.com www.mindset.research.yahoo.com | Share | Daily N/A |
Search Engine Market Share follows "The Long Tail"
The below graph illustrates “The Long Tail” for the search engines. The long tail is so tiny to see since the popular head of Google and Yahoo is so big.
Under a microscope (using a semi-log plot), we can exam its long tail. 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.
The ranking will be updated monthly.
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