Hurrah for the search engine, easily the most useful invention on the planet (with the possible exception of electricity, language, sanitation, the internal combustion engine, democracy, tomato ketchup and about a thousand other things). And hurrah for the multiplicity of search engines. We don't all use Google, you know. I thought I'd take a look into my referral logs to see which search engine was the most popular. Most successful at sending visitors to my blog, that is, which is not quite the same thing. And here's the top 10:
1) Google Image Search (32%): I hate Google Image Search. Not as a user, but as a website owner on the receiving end of its imbecilic referral system. I get far too many visitors to my blog looking for images that aren't actually here, just images that I've linked to at some time in the past. For example, try this search and click on the last image on the second row. I removed my link to that image months ago but Google still keeps directing people here to see "the image in its original context". And still they come, sigh.
2) msn Search (22%): Why is Bill Gates' search engine so popular? It can only be the devious and underhand tactic of incorporating it in 90% of the world's web browsers. Please say you never use it.
3) Google (13%): Rather further down the list than I was expecting, but still clearly the search engine of choice. Simple, clean, functional (and sends lots of visitors my way, thankyou).
4) Yahoo Search (11%): I remember when Yahoo search used to be a huge list of directories and subdirectories. They're still there, if you look hard enough, but it's now much quicker to search without them.
5) Ask Jeeves (5%): Or 'Ask', as it now likes to be known, but that's presumably because a lot of internet users can't spell 'Jeeves'.
6) AOL Search (4%): Dumbed down American rubbish. There's a lot of it about at the moment.
7) Wanadoo Search (2½%): Used to be Freeserve search. Again it looks as if many internet users are more than happy to use the search engine that their service provider provides.
8) BBC Search (2%): This is where your licence fee is going, on minority online services with no connection whatsoever to public service broadcasting. Personally I'm very happy about that.
9) Alltheweb (2%): Never heard of them before, but looks reasonable enough.
10) Lycos (1½%): Not so much a search engine, more an advert-swamped portal. Whatever happened to Lycos the dog?
I'm delighted to see that my blog is the number 1 result for "diamond geezer" in every single one of the above search engines (with the exception of Wanadoo where I'm beaten into second place by a diamond company who must be really pissed off that I beat them into second place on all the others). My favourite search engine, incidentally, is AltaVista which just misses my Top 10 list by landing at number 11. I've been using AltaVista for years, so maybe I just stick with it out of brand loyalty, but I really rate its results so I always search here before I turn to Google. Which search engine do you use?
