Hitwise Intelligence - Sandra Hanchard - Asia Pacific

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December 22, 2006

The (Still) Growing Influence of Search Engines

Here's another perspective using Hitwise data on the discussion of Fred Wilson's post, The De-Portalization of the Internet which has sparked some interesting discussion on the blogosphere. A key observation Fred makes is that "on a de-portalized web, it all starts with search". To emphasise this point, I've reproduced a 'brand view' of market share of visits of the top 10 properties in all categories. The brand view aggregates visits to the domains of a country brand to provide another indication of market share.

This ranking table shows that the Google Australia properties accounted for 7.71% market share. Examples of domains in the Google Australia brand view include images.google.com.au and news.google.com.au. This compares to the brand view of ninemsn, currently the most visited portal in Australia, which accounted for 3.38% of visits. Examples of domains in the ninemsn brand view include shopping.ninemsn.com.au and weather.ninemsn.com.au.

What this demonstrates is that Google Australia is still the most visited property even if we aggregate each portal sub-domain. And to drive home the growing influence of search engines in a de-portalized web, here's an Industry Clickstream chart that shows the traffic referrals by search engines to all categories:

For the week ending 16 December 2006, search engines accounted for 25.9% of upstream visits to all websites, up from 20.6% week ending February 4, 2006. It's likely that Search will ever-continue to help users navigate their way through the complexities of a dynamic web..

Posted by Sandra Hanchard at 12:12 PM
Posted to Search