---
title: "Alt Search Engine Market Share Mashup"
date: 2007-03-13
author: "Richard MacManus"
categories:
  - name: "ReadWriteWeb"
    url: "/category/readwriteweb.md"
tags:
  - name: "2007"
    url: "/tag/2007.md"
---

# Alt Search Engine Market Share Mashup

The mashups of our Top Alternative Search Engines [list](https://web.archive.org/web/20110830145716/http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_100_alternative_search_engines_feb07.php) continue! [Charles Knight](https://web.archive.org/web/20110830145716/http://www.readwriteweb.com/about_charles.php) spotted a great post by the [Search The Web 2.0 blog](https://web.archive.org/web/20110830145716/http://searchtheweb2.blogspot.com/2007/02/rankings-top-100-alternative-search.html), which took the top 100 and attempted to rank them by market share. The reason for this ambitious undertaking was a comment that Charles made when [we first published the list](https://web.archive.org/web/20110830145716/http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_100_alternative_search_engines.php):

> “…people actually use four main search engines for 99.99% of their searches: Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com (in that order).”

Well it turns out the figure is closer to 95.45%, and that’s counting AOL too! 🙂 Check out [the actual blog post](https://web.archive.org/web/20110830145716/http://searchtheweb2.blogspot.com/2007/02/rankings-top-100-alternative-search.html) for the full table, with market share for each of the 100 alt search engines and more. But I especially liked these two summary graphs:

The above graph ([large version here](https://web.archive.org/web/20110830145716/http://bp0.blogger.com/_rtriDVT-hlY/RcZnif_jN9I/AAAAAAAAAAM/zHKygNVtS1U/s1600-h/long_tail_0207.gif)) shows the long tail of search engines, which is so small because Google, Yahoo et al are so dominant.

This graph ([large version](https://web.archive.org/web/20110830145716/http://bp2.blogger.com/_rtriDVT-hlY/RcZnt__jN-I/AAAAAAAAAAU/yn_r7Jd5wOw/s1600-h/daily_searches_0207.gif)) shows the long tail “under a microscope (using a semi-log plot)”. As SearchTheWeb2 explains, “it clearly shows that the long tail for the alternative search engines is again dominated by a few such as AOL, Digg and Del.icio.us”.

Great stuff! Keep the mashups coming – you can find the other mashups, as well as Charles Knight’s original Alt Search Engine posts, on [his R/WW profile page](https://web.archive.org/web/20110830145716/http://www.readwriteweb.com/about_charles.php).

*Originally published on ReadWriteWeb ([archived copy](https://web.archive.org/web/20020204040018/http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/alt_search_engine_market_shares.php))*