The Top Five Search Engines
According to Nielsen/NetRatings,
a company that measures the impact of the Internet and new technologies on commerce
and marketing, the top five search engines during October of 2002 were Google,
Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and Ask Jeeves. The rankings take into account the percentage
of the entire Internet population that visited each site (audience reach) and
the average number of minutes spent per visitor at each site. These numbers
were adjusted to exclude non-search portal traffic such as email retrieval.
1. MSN
The number one ranked search engine was MSN. Its audience reach was 28.1% and it had an average visit length of 6.7 minutes.
2. Yahoo
Nielsen/NetRatings's number two ranked search engine was Yahoo. Its audience reach was 28.5% and it had an
average visit length of 10.8 minutes.
3. Google
The number three ranked search engine according to Nielsen/NetRatings was Google.
Its audience reach was 29.2% and it had an average visit length of 25.7 minutes.
4. AOL
The fourth largest search engine in the Nielsen/NetRatings study was
AOL. Its audience reach was 19.7% and it had
an average visit length of 36.4 minutes.
5. Ask Jeeves
Rounding out Nielsen/NetRatings's top five search engines was AskJeeves. Its
audience reach was 10.3% and it had an average visit length of 10.0 minutes.
Other Important Search Engines
Other important search engines include
AlltheWeb,
Lycos,
Teoma,
MetaCrawler,
Netscape,
InfoSpace,
Overture,
Alta Vista,
Open Directory Project,
Hotbot,
Looksmart,
Excite,
IWon,
Earthlink,
BigEye,
and Inktomi.
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