Yahoo! Remains Ruler of Search Referrals

Yahoo now accounts for nearly 56 percent of all search engine referrals, according to statistics compiled by WebSideStory's StatMarket.com.

Between Jan. 12 and Dec. 19 of 1999, Yahoo's market share rose nearly 18 percentage points, giving the search engine/portal a five-to-one lead over its nearest competitors. Nearly 14 percent of Yahoo's growth has occurred since the beginning of September, according to StatMarket.

Yahoo's gains have come, as one would expect, at the expense of other search engines. Excite saw its referral percentage plummet nearly 17 percent from 26.51 percent on Jan. 13 to 9.66 percent on Dec. 19. Excite currently ranks third on StatMarket's list. Despite dropping 6.5 percentage points since Feb. 4, AltaVista came in second place with 11.18 percent of all search engine referrals on Dec. 19.

In addition to Yahoo, Go Network experienced a significant gain in market share, the statistics found. Go placed fourth with a market share of 8 percent, and has gained more than 7.5 points since April 22, when it claimed only 0.34 percent of referrals. Lycos, which ranked fifth with 5 percent, also showed considerable gains, moving up nearly four points since early January. InfoSeek rounded out the top 10 with 0.91 percent of referrals, a drop of more than seven points since Sept. 7.

The StatMarket data is based on statistics gathered from an estimated 35,000,000 unique daily visitors to more than 100,000 Web sites using the HitBox traffic analyzer.