My SiteMeter stats have made one thing clear over the last several months - my traffic from Google and Google Images is growing rapidly, and no other search engine, including Yahoo!, MSN, Live.com or AOL, are even making a dent.There's really no second place. Instead, there's Google, and then there's everybody else.
Google traffic to louisgray.com dwarfs all competitors.
In the last few months, referrals from Google Images have largely taken over the #1 position from Google's standard searches. Over time, the ANtics comics have drawn a tremendous amount of traffic from curious baseball fans, and the occasional odd post on The Simpsons and adult material have delivered the lion's share of the rest.
Using the Summary Web logs analysis application, I reviewed the site logs from January 1 forward, and saw the massive gap between Google and everyone else to be more than I had ever anticipated. It turns out that thanks to Google's unique combination of Google search, Google Blog Search, Google Image Search and Google Reader, the company is delivering almost 96% of all referrals from search engines to my blog. AOL, MSN, Live.com and Yahoo! don't even crack one percent apiece.
A lot of people are concerned that Google's position is a bad thing for consumers and for competition, and it's clear the competition isn't making a good show in this race. But if the other players even had serviceable offerings, this would be a different story. The sad truth is that they don't. If they want to stick around, they should either dramatically enhance their offerings, or forget competing with Google, and stick to other tools they do well - whether it be start pages, instant message tools, news or social media. As it stands today, the verdict is in, Google has won, and they've won big.