MSN - passed Google in Alexa Ranking now #2

I thought some of you might find this post from the Alexa Web Discovery Blog interesting:

http://awis.blogspot.com/

My-o-my I wonder how they did that. Does this mean, because of the validity and accuracy of Alexa rankings, that MSN now dominates the search engine world? This is totally amazing. I wonder how MSN did this. I know it cannot be because Alexa rankings are nothing but B.S. You know or can explain how MSN did this?

MSN has news and lots of other content on their site. Google is closer to straight search. So this Alexa data is not a metric of search popularity.

You think maybe that folks that visit MSN are more likely to be ones that have installed the Alexa toolbar? Lest we forget... without the toolbar installed... there is no Alexa data with which to rank sites.

Maybe MSN's share of search is growing but I'd say if it is, it can't be by much. On the major site I manage (Alexa top 100,000) our Google traffic trends have shown very consistent rises in the same periods for two years consecutively. We run a seasonal business. The growth in our high season has gone from 1,300 week Google referrals to 3,800 to 7,000 in corresponding weeks from year to year. With keyword ranking being relatively the same year to year too.

My Yahoo and MSN curves rise a little but in direct comparison to Google referrals, they have very moderate increases.

Our Google curve is almost going straight up for right now and we expect to plateau in 5 weeks at 8,500 referrals a week.

This just tells me as Neilsen.net has mentioned in the past, the amount of people using the web in the U.S. continues to increase by billions a year and the percentages of those using Google remains the same something like 48 - 52%. With about 2 billion new searches in 2006 (for example) this is a hell of a lot of new searches for Google.

Oh... I left out that our MSN SERPs. are almost identical to our Google SERPs.

Its sounds very understandable that msn gets more traffic, we can make a simple comparizon:

Msn subdomains and sections:
-hotmail.msn.com
-my.msn.com
-moneycentral.msn.com
-msnbc.msn.com
-search.msn.com
-travel.msn.com
-spaces.msn.com
-shopping.msn.com
-And dont forget that msn sales internet connection in the US and other countries and have as default for his msnexporer the msn website
-Also when windows is just install it displays msn as the main page of the internet explorer and some lazy guys (including me) never change the default page.

And well google have some few subdomains but they are not a visit as the msn ones becuase most of them are for webmasters and for experiments, the only big one there is adsence.google.com and adwords.google.com which i dont think can even match the msnbc.msn.com domain in terms of traffic...

Google is almost only for search.... msn can search, look for a job, hotmail, get you news.....

Goto google.com there is pretty much only 1 thing to do : search

Goto msn.com there is thousands of things to do!

People goto google.com to search alot more than any other se, but people goto MSN and yahoo for many more things than just searching, ie stocks, more popular emails that the new gmail, news, shopping, etc.

Hotmail alone is bound to bring in alot of hits...