One of my favorite affiliates pointed me to this May 31st press release for metasearch company Infospace that shows that the major search engines aren’t meeting searcher’s needs as well as I thought and that the major engine’s results don’t overlap that much at all. Some of the findings were:

• Web searches on average use three search engines a month
• Only 0.6 percent of 776,435 first page search results were the same across the top for Web search engines
• Between 38 and 46 percent of all searches fail to elicit a click on a first-page search result
• Only 3.6 percent of the number-one ranked, non-sponsored search results were the same across all search engines in a given query

I find these results interesting not because it seems that all of the search engines used in this study (Google, Yahoo, MSN Live, and Ask) have very different interpretations of what sites are relevant and what are not. That is pretty obvious when you use the different engines. What I do find surprising is that 38 to 46 percent of users aren’t clicking anything on the first page. I would assume this is mainly because they aren’t seeing anything that interests them.

On the surface, that might sound like a big failure on the search engine’s part, but I would look at it as an open opportunity for affiliates to give searches the sites and pages that they want.

The internet is vast, and the opportunity is endless if you can find it.

You can read the press release here, and there are a few more facts here.

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