Recap of ‘The Search Landscape’ – SES San Jose 2007

Bill Tancer of Hitwise gave perhaps the most applicable analysis of the session, at least as far as small businesses are concerned, on what’s happening in the world of search.

• 65% of all searches in the United States in July of 2007 were executed on Google. Year-over-year, Google has gained about four percent, taking most of that at MSN’s expense. Newcomers, including human-powered search engines like Mahalo, are not even in the top 52 of all search engines used in the United States. In fact, despite all of the search engine industry buzz around Mahalo, it ranks as the 1400th most popular engine.
• 70% of Google searches came from its homepage (www.google.com), with 10% from YouTube. Interestingly, both video.google.com and maps.google.com were at just over 1%. Maps (which is also “Local”) and Video, however are both up about 20% since Google Universal Search was released earlier this spring.
• Facebook has made a very strong move since opening up its system to registration with ANY email address (it was limited to .edu emails previously), and now ranks in the top 10 most visited sites on the web. Facebook and other social networks are NOT dependent on search for growth, and indeed get a majority of new visitors from email and other social networks! Bill sees social networking sites as becoming the world’s representative ‘default’ pages within the next couple of years, supplanting other portal or search engine domains.

Some quick hits from the other three panelists — Jon Stewart of Nielsen//NetRatings, Jeremy Crane of Compete.com, and James Lamberti of Comscore:

• For large, Fortune 500 / Fortune 1000 brands, search converts to purchases in retail at about the same rate as banner ads.  The vast majority of retail purchases online still come from direct traffic to these sites.  (I have a hunch this would NOT hold true for niche products being sold online from small business.  Search works tremendously well for these kinds of clients.)
• 90% of all online media spending occurs on the top 50 most-trafficked websites.  Advertisers should be taking a much closer look at smaller publishers for more targeted messaging and better ROI.
• Here’s an interesting stat: seniors and women are significantly more likely to use Yahoo and MSN than are men and young or middle-aged people.
• Search still plays a very important role in branding–search patterns show that people search for information about a product or service well in advance of purchasing.
• The definition of ‘search’ is expanding to many, many more areas than just the big four search engines–MySpace and eBay would be the #4 and #5 search engine if metrics were run on these sites, and YouTube has over 1 Billion searches per month in the United States!