Relate:
How Search Engines Rank Webpages

Tomorrow morning starts my 8 hours of presenting for our first SEOmoz training seminar. As such, I have very limited time for blogging tonight, but I wanted to share this hard-to-believe piece of data:

According to Compete.com (who buys their data from ISPs and has some "proprietary" methods of traffic monitoring as well), Yahoo! is the most successful engine at getting users to "click" a result. This would suggest that Yahoo!'s customer satisfaction rate with their results may actually be the highest and that Yahoo! is doing the best job of the three major engines in turning searchers into site visitors. Check out what else they have to say:

...Lower search fulfillment numbers mean that on a percentage basis fewer search queries on that engine resulted in the searcher clicking on a result link. So from this perspective one might consider Yahoo! more effective at getting consumers the results they want....

This data actually matches somewhat with reports that Yahoo! traffic is higher converting higher than Google (source: WebSideStory), though MSN supposedly has the highest conversion rate. Yahoo! also supposedly does the best job of keeping traffic on their domain - forwarding search referrals to Yahoo! properties like News, Sports, Entertainment, Answers, etc. - perhaps there's a correlation.

I don't have a good answer here, and I can't say for certain if the research is accurate, but it certainly would be interesting to see whether Yahoo! users actually feel more satisfied with their results. As we've often seen - just because a product is better at satisfying the customer doesn't mean the customer feels more satisfied with that brand. Perhaps that is the non-Googlers' biggest hurdle to overcome.