Yahoo! Search Traffic Plummets

The trend is clear: Yahoo!’s search traffic Free Falls.

The Search Engine wars have always been sketchy with each trying to reach more visitors and appealing to visitors to use them as their “homepage”.  The search engine wars will forever continue, but for the time being, the results are clear.  For the past 3 months, Yahoo! has been losing a lot of traffic.

Google is the recipient for most of the traffic loss from Yahoo! as seen in the numbers below.   The agreement between Microsoft and Yahoo! hasn’t helped stop the big fish, Google and probably will never stop Google’s momentum.  If you didn’t already know, Microsoft’s Bing search engine provides Yahoo!’s paid search.  Microsoft retains all money made from Bing advertising, while Yahoo! only keeps about 90% of the ad revenue from Yahoo!

The results below are explicit “core” search queries where users enter a search term in the search box o none of the three sites.  It doesn’t include other search features that may be part of the search engine.  It does not contain mobile search traffic numbers nor searches performed outside of the United States — two more areas where Google is even that much more dominant.

The numbers for for the last year.. notice the RED section below of Yahoo!’s steep decline in traffic.