I thought I would share some data which reflects what we’re seeing as far as search trends. To do so, I needed to manually compile the statistics from multiple sites which we are tracking. I chose to compile data from 10 sites: Not the top 10; a random 10. Nonetheless, it represents almost 4,000,000 search engine referrals in the span. (a total of ~40,000,000 page views for these 10 sites alone). That’s a lot.

For the data used, no two sites are in the same industry. They are all U.S. based websites, and thus English only - hence a skew in the data. (NOTE: Sept 11, 2006 - They are all California based sites). Also, none are blogs, nor any photo sites. Also, none are social networking sites. At some point I could manually compile data which reflects each of those verticals. That’s going to take quite a bit of time.

I thought the results were interesting; first the search engine usage trends, and second the country usage trend. The data reflects a short period, so it’s not meant to imply it’s representative of anything much more than August 15 - 31.

Note: since I did not include any blog data you’ll not see Technorati, IceRocket, or Google Blogsearch in this top 10 list. I suspect they would all appear in a similar study of blog data. Similarly; Google Images, Yahoo Video, etc. would likely appear in the results for any site which features a lot of video / graphical content.

Do your site trends look similar?

Using Enquisite, you can know this, and a whole lot more.