Thursday, November 20, 2008

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Search Engine Loyalty is High; Google Ranks Highest

A new survey from WebSurveyor and Strategem Research shows that 87.2% of all Web users are quite loyal to a specific one or two search engines when looking for information online.

56.7% of users rely on one search engine or directory for their online searches. An additional 30.5% regularly use a small group of a few search engines. The smallest amount, 12.8%, say they use a different search engine each time, depending on what they are looking for.

Not surprisingly, Google has the highest loyalty rate among its users, 65.8%, most likely due to its minimalistic home page design and focus on search results. Yahoo! has a loyalty rate of 55.2%, MSN has a loyalty rate of 53.7%, and AOL has a loyalty rate of 48.6%.

And, as we've been telling our search engine marketing clients for years, virtually no one looks past the top three pages worth of results. According to this survey, 91.8% of respondents modify and re-launch their search using the same search engine if they don't like what they find in the first three pages of results. The good news is that they're staying with the same search engine with which they started.

The most surprising result of the survey is that search engine toolbars have become fairly popular. 49.3% of respondents have at least one search engine tool bar installed in their browser. 22% use the Yahoo! tool bar, 19.7% use Google, and 17.4% use MSN.