Tag Archives: search

That title might have inspired thoughs of Jedi Knights, those with ADD might have instantly warped their thought trains to Pink Floyd and "The Dark Side of The Moon". Both might be correct in their connections. Just like you couldn't see the dark side of the force, and you can't see the dark side of the moon, you can't actually see all of your traffic that originates from search on the internet. This is something that Tim O'Reily seems to be forgetting.

Search is only one way to find things. It's the most easily monetizable, so it gets the lion's share of the attention. But take a look at (and report on) what percentage of techcrunch's traffic comes from search. For the O'Reilly Radar blog, it's about 35%. Significant, sure, but hardly a sign of lack of competition. If Google absorbed both Yahoo! and Microsoft, the share of our visits coming from search would still be below 40%. (That tells you what a small share of our search traffic comes from the other guys today.) And that's just the web traffic. Count in RSS (which is much bigger than web for most blogs, including ours) and the Search share of traffic goes down to a much smaller amount. So there's not much worry about people not being able to find information.