Yahoo have just published their ‘Year in Review’ showing what we were all searching for on Yahoo.co.uk in 2010. And it’s not the kind of stuff you would necessarily expect. Sure there’s some celebrity focus, but there’s some more serious stuff too.

Here’s the top 10 (#last year’s position)

1. Lottery (new entry)
2. Job Centre (#3)
3. Weather (new entry)
4. Big Brother (#1)
5. Cheryl Cole (#9)
6. TV guide (new entry)
7. World Cup (new entry)
8. Train times ( #10)
9. Katie Price (#8)
10. Horoscopes (new entry)

Richard Evans, Yahoo! News Editor commented: ‘Looking at the billions of searches made on yahoo.co.uk over the last year, two things jump out, One is that we are a worried nation, concerned about our futures as we enter an ‘age of austerity’. The second is that we find our escape from this worry through reality TV, entertainment and celebrity’

No doubt next year is going to feature some attention on the Royal Wedding.

When it comes to the celebrity top 10, here’s the order:

1. Cheryl Cole (#4)
2. Katie Price (#3)
3. Lady Gaga (#6)
4. John Terry (new entry)
5. Angelina Jolie (new entry)
6. Victoria Beckham (new entry)
7. Megan Fox (#10)
8. Justin Bieber (new entry)
9. Peter Andre (new entry)
10. Katy Perry (new entry)

Is there anything that we can learn as website builders? Well the main one is that if you write about the kind of things people talk about, you have a much better chance to appear in the Google search results and get traffic. Of course, it has to be relevant to your website – there’s not much point in attracting traffic from people looking for Cheryl Cole if you sell bathroom cabinets!

For more SEO advice take a look at our SEO Services.

Were these your top searches too, or have none of your common searches made it into the top 10?

There’s a story over on Search Engine Land that discusses the number of searches carried out on Twitter every month. This is following the redesign on the Twitter homepage to make the service more search focused.

At the Twitter Chirp conference Co founder Ev Williams said that the service is handling a massive 19 billion searches per month. That, incredibly, is more than Bing and Yahoo combined. And that’s from a service that is in reality just 3 years old.

Here’s the official monthly search figures of all the top players, according to comScore:

Google: 88 billion per month
Twitter: 19 billion per month
Yahoo: 9.4 billion per month
Bing: 4.1 billion per month

Google numbers are for more than just the search engine, and include those for images, maps and –crucially – YouTube). As you can see, Twitter is now in position 2.

However, there are a few holes in Twitter figures. For a starter they’re self reporting. Secondly, those searches are often made by third party applications such as desktop clients tweetdeck and Seesmic.

And thirdly – and most significantly – many are ‘standing queries’ that are being carried out on a users behalf. For example, one of my columns in Tweetdeck is a search for ‘webeden’, so I can have a look to see if anyone is mentioning us. I’m not making that search every day, but did it once when I set up Tweetdeck. But now Tweetdeck is carrying out that search on my behalf every 150 seconds throughout the day.

Last but not least, many users choose to display their Twitter profile or a keyword search on their websites. (If you want to do this watch our tutorial on how to put your Twitter profile on your website). In these cases it’s the actual websites that are making constant, standing searches on Twitter.

So the figure of 19bn might be not quite what we’d understand as 19bn if it was searches being carried out on one of the traditional search engines. They aren’t all individual varied searches for information, products or services.

As for the actual Twitter Search page, it contributes just ‘ a few million’ searches per months. Here’s our in depth guide on how to search on Twitter.

Do you find Twitter search useful? Were you even aware it existed? Leave us a comment below.

It seems like every week we rack up another success story on Google’s road to riches. But for the first time I can remember, this is one that goes against that trend.

Wait for it: Google’s share of the UK search market actually DROPPED in February! According to stats from the AT Internet Institute, Google dropped by 1.6%, losing ground to both Bing and Yahoo.

I’m not saying they’re in trouble: Google market share is still at 89.2%. No reason to panic. Yahoo gained 0.6% giving them a 4.1% share. Bing added 0.7% which places it at3.8%. These figures were of course collected before Bing kicked off its huge Advertising campaign.

Google is much more favoured by Brits than Americans: US market share for the search giant stands at around 65%. Europeans love Google too: in France it has 89% market share, and in Germany it stands at 94%, and in Spain its 93%.

Last year we announced that Yahoo and Microsoft would be merging their search engines. In the last couple of weeks, US regulators have finally given that deal the go ahead. The new search offering which will all be powered by Bing means that when it comes to search engines its now just a two horse race.

If you’re not sure which search engine you prefer, try testing all three alongside, and stripped of branding, to see which one gets on best in the blind search test.

Despite some ups and downs, Microsoft’s newest search engine ‘Bing’ has generally been judged to be successful.

The search engine has some innovative new features, not least of which is the ability to preview web pages before you actually click through to them. From a look and feel perspective it’s very pleasant – the starting screen is usually a stunning landscape picture.

Market share

In the US it has captured a significant share of the search engine market, although this has come at the expense of other Microsoft search platforms, and Yahoo, rather than market leading Google.

There of course it has been helped by an advertising campaign estimated to have cost in the region of $100m – quite a persuasive amount of money.

In the UK Bing is capturing just 4% of the search queries, vs Yahoo’s 6% and Google’s 88%. But all that may be about to change as Microsoft announced they would kick off a huge campaign for the UK search engine.

A Decision Engine?

The campaign questions the need for the “information overload” that Google provides. It champions Bing’s ability to deliver clear and concise results. The creative carries the strapline ‘Bing and decide” and attempts to position Bing as a ‘decision engine’. Microsoft wants users to imagine that Bing cuts through the clutter of the Internet to find the answers they need.

There are three TV ads in all – kicking off today and running for three months – and you’ll start to see ads for Bing on Social Networking websites too.

Here’s the first one:

Are you a fan of Bing? Have you even tried it? What about having a go at the blind search test to see which search engine you really prefer? Leave us a comment below.

On this blog we’ve talked quite a bit about the market share of each search engine. Despite their best efforts to launch new search engines such as Bing; or to combine their search engines; neither Microsoft nor Yahoo appear able to challenge the dominance of Google.

But may be the challenger is coming from a different direction. Last year we ran with a story that said that Facebook was the fastest growing search engine. And Facebook is growing in all other areas too.

Facebook is good for News Websites

For example, according to Hitwise traffic from Facebook to US news sites has tripled over the last year, whilst Google’s share has remained static.

This has emboldened news publishers such as Rupert Murdoch to demand money from Google for their content, or face being locked out of it.

Now that Facebook has passed the 400m user milestone, it might be Facebook that is the biggest threat to the way Google wants to run things.

Google on the Run

Is Google scared? Well for the first time ever they splashed out $5m on a TV ad during the Superbowl a few weeks ago. Is that a proactive move or a reactive one?

Facebook already has a cosier relationship with news providers, who often choose to publish their content on Facebook.

Of course Google claim that actually they are helping news publishers, sending them an estimated 4bn visits every year.

With Facebook and Twitter of course the content is entirely at the publishers’ discretion, and they get to see who is reading it; both features that Google does not let them have.

Some have speculated that were Facebook to launch a comprehensive web-wide search engine, Google would lose huge traffic overnight.

Google Buzz Fail?

Then too there is the launch of Google Buzz – a defensive move surely, as Google tries to muscle in on the social media landscape.

Do you think the Google Empire may be having a wobble? Or have Google got nothing to worry about; Facebook is no threat to them? Leave us a comment below.

According to a recent report by website monitoring firm ComScore, Internet users love affair with search engines continues to deepen.

For the month of December 2009, worldwide search volumes increased by a massive 46% over the same month in 2008. That means there that just in December there were 131bn searches, more than 4bn for every day of the month.

The country with the most searches was the US, with 17% of the global share. The UK hit a total of 6.2bn searches, more than punching its weight per head of population. That’s 100 searches for everyone in the country, and is a 35% increase year on year.

And which search engines are being used? Of course its Google who dominates, with 67% of the global search volume. Google grew by 58% over the 12 month period. But it was a great year for Microsoft, who saw a huge 70% growth year on year, from 2.4bn to 4.1bn searches. Yahoo was up a much more modest 13%, hitting 9.4bn.

And as have mentioned previously, it is Facebook that has also hit the search headlines, delivering 1.5bn searches, up 54% year on year.

“The global search market continues to grow at an extraordinary rate, with both highly developed and emerging markets contributing to the strong growth worldwide. Search is clearly becoming a more ubiquitous behaviour among internet users, which drives navigation not only directly from search engines but also within sites and across networks”, said Jack Flanagan, executive VP at ComScore.

Do you always search on Google? How can you be sure that you prefer it? Why not take a blind search test? And then leave us a comment below.

Bing was big news last year. Despite some ups and downs, Microsoft’s newest search engine, was generally judged to be a success.

The icing on the cake for Bing came when Yahoo and Microsoft tied up a search deal that would see Bing results replace Yahoos on several Yahoo properties.

But whilst that deal is tied up with US regulators, both companies are having a harder time in the current market place.

According to figures from web measurement firm ‘Neilsen’, the market share growth of Bing had come to a halt in December.

And the story is worse for Yahoo, which continued a decline which began several months – if not years – earlier.

9.9% of all US searches in December were on Bing, down from 10.7% in November,

Over the same period Yahoo slid from 15.3 % to 14.4%. Back in July Yahoo had as much as 17.1%.

No guesses for where this market share has gone: Google was up 1.9% in December to 67.3%. Back in August it was 64.6%.

Bing’s slide is all the more worrying for Microsoft because they had a big US advertising campaign for Bing in December, which positioned the service as a ‘decision engine’ rather than a search engine.

Of course these are all figures for the US. In the UK, Google powers close to 90% of all web searches.

Do you just stick to Google, or do you try all the others too? How do you know whether you prefer Google? Leave us a comment below.

Another day, another statistic about how big and popular Google is. This time its ComScore, who have just released the research that total internet searches are up by a colossal 41%.

And you’ve guessed it: Google is the search engine that has driven most of that growth.

What’s amazing about this statistic however is that the change is so huge in what is considered to be a fairly mature market.

Its one thing to grow massively in your early stages, when any change represents a big percentage. But when you’re already very big, which search engines are (using search engines is by far the most popular online activity), then even significant absolute growth is usually just a few percentage points.

Here are the specifics: Global searches went up from 80 billion to 114 billion between July 2008 and July 2009. And Google grew from 49 billion searches to 77 billion. That means Google has hovered up 67% of the global search market.

Elsewhere, Yahoo grew just 2% with searches rising from 8.7 billion to 8.9 billion. That gives it 7.8% of the global search market. Chinese search engine Baidu went up 8% from 7.4 billion to just under 8 billion. Even though Baidu draws it user base from just one country, that still means it has 7% of the global market.

Microsoft, by contrast, saw very healthy growth of 41%, but this was from a fairly modest base of 2.35 billion searches.

In terms of a global break down, most searches happen in Europe, which produced 32% of searches. This was followed by Asia Pacific (31%), North America (22%) and Latin America (9%).

Where will it all end? Is this just the tip of the iceberg, or the top of the hill? No wonder new entrants want to grab a piece of this market. Leave us a comment below.

When you think ‘search engine’ what brand springs to mind? For almost all of us it’s Google. This is especially so in the UK, where Google powers around 90% of all Internet searches. Some of you may still think ‘Yahoo’. And a few pioneers might think ‘Bing’.

But according to the ComScore monthly search report, its Facebook that is experiencing the fastest growth as a search engine. Search volumes on Facebook grew by a massive 35% in July alone.

Other brands experiencing strong growth in search were Craigslist (8%), eBay and Bing (5%), Flickr and Delicious (4%) and YouTube (1%).

The growth in these brands not normally associated with search queries was very much at the cost of the traditional search engines. Google fell 2%, AskJeeves 4%, and Yahoo and AOL dropped 5% each.

In terms of absolute numbers, the traditional search engines still rule the roost. In July there were 12.9 billion searches on Google; 2.8 billion on Yahoo; and Microsoft sites accumulated 1.3 billion searches.

Google of course is fiercely protecting its users’ ‘eye-time’. They have recognised the huge revenue potential of social networking, by adding lots of sticky and social features to their web properties. The most recent defensive move was their shift to feature ‘real time‘ entries in the search engine results page. But if Facebook search continues to grow at this rate, it might be that Google will have to start to defend its pure search homeland.

And it seems that Facebook has real ambition when it comes to search. Facebook recently bought FriendFeed and also expanded its own services, which has boosted its ability to provide real-time search.

A few weeks ago Facebook unveiled a new search service that allows members to search for status updates, links, photos and videos. Whilst previously users could find entries for other users’ profiles, the new Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) serve them in categories depending on the search query.

Have you tried searching on Facebook? Do you think that Facebook could be a serious rival to Google when it comes to search? Do you think Facebook will be able to monetise their new services? Leave us a comment below.

Lots of the time on this blog we go on about Google. We’ve extolled its virtues as a search engine, and waxed lyrical about its rate of innovation. And when it comes to Search Engine Optimisation, the advice we give you is how to boost your website up the Search Engine Results page for Google, and not Yahoo or Bing.

All this of course is because Google is the most popular search engine. In the US 65% of web users prefer Google. In the UK it’s closer to 90%.

But how do you know that you prefer Google? Oh sure, at some point in the past you tried it, liked it, and found the results the most accurate search could offer. You made the psychological decision to stick with it and be loyal. If you have tried another search engine since, such as Bing, how many of you had already decided to give it a go in the full knowledge that you’d still stick to Google no matter how good the results?

And that’s typical of how, as consumers, we choose one brand over another. The first time you try similar products from different companies, it’s difficult to make up your mind. But once the mind is made up, most of us tend to keep to that decision. Apart from requiring no further effort, it constantly reaffirms to each of us that we made the right choice.

And that’s where blind search testing comes in. The website http://blindsearch.fejus.com allows you to compare the results for Google, Yahoo and Bing. The results are stripped bare of any branding, design, or clues to which search engine is delivering which result. Users can than vote for the result that they think is most relevant to their search query

And the interesting thing is that once all that branding is stripped away, we can make an honest decision about which SERP is most relevant to our search query. Once again we can evaluate the quality of the results without any preconceptions of that search engine’s brand.

Here’s the surprising bit. After around a month of testing, this blind search tool found that users preferred Google 41% of the time, Bing 31% and Yahoo 28%. That’s a huge discrepancy each search engine’s actual market share.

Aside from showing that we’re making the decision to stick with Google for reasons other than its accurate results, it also shows what an uphill battle the other search engines have. Even if they make their product much, much better than Google, in all likelihood people are going to be reluctant to switch.

Have a go on the blind search tool and let us know which result you prefer best.