The world of search engine technologies has been changing at an incredibly fast rate. Names that determined how we thought of searching just a few years ago are now breathing their final breaths (and AltaVista, may you rest in peace). Even from one year to the next, we can see major trends in how the search engines are faring. So, how did the search engines and other top sites compare from 2009 to 2010?
According to the report release by Hitwise, 2009 saw Google in the top spot, Yahoo Mail in second, the core Yahoo search in fourth, Microsoft’s Live Mail in sixth, the Yahoo search page in eighth, and MSN in ninth. That means that six of the top ten sites belonged to one of the search engine giants.
Now, in 2010, Facebook has pushed Google out of the number one slot (which is something we’ve known for a while, but which is now official). The Yahoo properties remain largely unchanged; Yahoo Mail is now in third, the core Yahoo page is in fourth, and the Yahoo search page is in ninth. In the meanwhile, Microsoft seems to be creeping up. MSN took the number six slot, and while Live Mail dropped to position eight, Bing crept into tenth position.
While it may look like Yahoo and MSN are closing the gap on Google, it should be noted that there’s a significant gap between the number two and number three slot for 2010. While Google’s third place ranking comes from having about seven percent of all online traffic, Yahoo Mail’s third place position shows only about three percent.
This study is based on pages that receive visits most frequently, and is based far more on repeat visits than it is on unique visitors.
